October 31, 2009

Lean books

It's time for my annual blog entry. Hmm, November is supposed to be the writing month, so I hope I could write some more (though not necessarily in this blog).

In this past year I have read many books related to lean, especially linking with research, product development, and software development. I'll list here the books that I've actually read (at least most of the book).

  1. Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer [Indonesian translation]
  2. Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way Fieldbook [Indonesian translation] These two Toyota way books describe the basic principle of lean.
  3. James Morgan and Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota product development system: integrating people, process, and technology. This one describe the implementation of lean in product development environment.
  4. Michael Kennedy, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It
  5. Michael Kennedy et al, Ready, Set, Dominate: Implement Toyota's Set-Based Learning for Developing Products and Nobody Can Catch You. The two books by Kennedy stresses the importance of the four pillars of lean development, i.e. expert engineering workforce, entrepreneurial system designer, set-based concurrent engineering and responsibility-based planning and control. Then how to use set-based learning to achieve those.
  6. David James Anderson, Agile management for software engineering: applying the theory of constraints for business results. This is the book that tries to apply those principles to agile software development, especially from the point of view of the business management perspective.
  7. Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang, Software by numbers: low-risk, high-return development. Introduce the concept of MMF (minimal marketable feature)
  8. David Mann, Creating a lean culture: tools to sustain lean conversions. Describe the management and control tools to maintain lean process, including kanban.
  9. Allen C Ward, Lean product and process development. This is another important books on revolutionizing the way we design product.
  10. Beau Keyte and Drew Locher, The complete lean enterprise: value stream mapping for administrative and office processes. Applying value stream mapping method on the whole process.
  11. Corey Ladas, Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development. This is important book that introduces Kanban Software Development.
  12. Tom DeMarco, Slack: getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency. It's about the strength of knowledge work: people.
  13. David Allen, Getting things done: the art of stress-free productivity. While not generally considered related to lean, the GTD method does related to kanban and the concept of lean flow. It is lean at the personal level.
Note: I bought the books in local bookstores, http://www.betterworld.com, http://www.amazon.com, http://www.informit.com, http://www.lean.org and http://www.lulu.com.