Real-World Kanban, Second Edition

Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking

by Mattias Skarin

When your team is stressed, priorities are unclear, and nobody knows what anyone else is doing, morale and productivity plummet. But it’s never too late to improve team cohesion, boost engagement, and save your derailed projects. Dive into five real-world Kanban case studies and discover how teams like yours created a shared focus, improved time to market, and turned things around. With illustrations of the Kanban boards, diagrams, and graphs that led to success, you’ll get a look behind the scenes. This updated edition even includes a diverse library of Kanban board examples to jump-start your journey.

When teams and projects go off the rails, it can be tough to get everyone and everything back on track quickly. But it’s never too late. Leverage insights and expertise from five real-world Kanban case studies to decrease time to market, improve engagement, and save your people and projects.

Discover how software development teams just like yours went from overwork, unclear priorities, and lack of direction to productivity, focus, and cohesion. Uncover paradigm-changing improvements that made all the difference, and use battle-tested expertise and experience as a roadmap for your own success. Along the way, you’ll improve the full value chain with Enterprise Kanban; boost engagement, teamwork, and flow in change management and operations; help external teams keep pace with rapid growth; manage the shift from individual contributors to a well-functioning team; and improve cohesion in remote-first work.

Thoroughly revised and expanded with new chapters on using Kanban in capital markets and improving remote work with Kanban, this updated edition also includes a diverse library of Kanban board examples to help you get turned around and heading in the right direction fast.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

Releases:

• B1.0 2025/03/24

Note: Contents and extracts of beta books will change as the book is developed.

• Introduction
• Take Charge and Make Changes
  • Who Should Read This Book?
  • Helpful Books
  • Online Resources
• Leading with Kanban
  • Putting Your Flow Glasses On
  • Improving Flow with Kanban
  • Applying Kanban in Knowledge Work
  • Next Steps
• Using Kanban in the Enterprise excerpt
  • The Challenge: Improving Time to Market
  • How We Got Started
  • How the Process Worked
  • What Lessons We Learned
  • Comparing Now and Before
  • Make Your Own Improvements
  • Next steps
• Using Kanban to Manage Change
  • The Challenge: Managing Dependencies Without Burning Out
  • How We Got Started
  • How Our Process Worked
  • How We Continuously Improved
  • What Lessons We Learned
  • Comparing Now and Before
  • Make Your Own Improvements
  • Next steps
• Using Kanban to Save a Derailing Project excerpt
  • The Challenge: Restoring Trust by Solving the Right Problem
  • How We Got Started
  • How Our Process Worked
  • How We Continuously Improved
  • What Lessons We Learned
  • Comparing Now and Before
  • Make Your Own Improvements
  • Next steps
• Using Kanban in the Back Office: Outside IT excerpt
  • The Challenge: Keeping Up with Growth
  • How We Got Started
  • How Our Process Worked
  • How We Continuously Improved
  • What Lessons We Learned
  • Comparing Now and Before
  • Make Your Own Improvements
  • Next steps
• Using Kanban in Capital Markets
  • The challenge : Solving the Seniority Catch-22
  • Don’t wait for the perfect timing
  • A detour to alternative process frameworks
  • Going back to Kanban
  • Lessons learned
  • Make your own improvements
  • Next steps
• Using Kanban in Remote Work
  • Building Remote-first Kanban Teams that Work Well
  • For your journey ahead
• Kanban Board Examples
  • Product Development
  • Software development flow
  • Development team with multiple clients
  • Development team practicing prediction
  • Full value chain
  • Mixing product discovery and delivery
  • Progress by architecture
  • Business operations
  • Corporate Legal
  • Product roadmap for complex system (HW+SW)
  • System administration team
  • DevOps for online platform
  • Release management
  • First line support
  • Marketing and Sales – sales team from lead to deal
  • Sales team respond to RFP
  • Unpacking vision and high-level goals