I rarely recommend business books. I have little patience for the pseudo-novels about how some project overcame challenges by applying the techniques advocated by the authors. That is just me. Others seem to enjoy and learn from such texts. I prefer texts that explain how well-established techniques from other fields can be adapted to our domain. We all have much to learn from adjacent fields.
Recently, a friend and colleague recommended I read Donald Reinertsen’s text The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. The Reinertsen text is such a book, drawing lessons from economics, statistics, queue management in telecom, and even how the military organizes to respond to a rapidly changing environment.
The readers of this blog presumably share my interests in applying what can be learned from a variety of fields to understanding the dynamics and economics of software and system development. This has been the topics
Briefly, I strongly recommend this book.
[…] I apply these observations to show how to instrument for software the product product flow measures found in value stream maps. These are the measures needed to implement the Donald Reinertsen’s flow principles. […]
Murray, good to see you are remaining active. We had a couple interactions when I was an analyst at EMA; I forwarded you some research from Chris Verhoef (which you found unconvincing) and also the work on Monte Carlo and Kanban by Magennis (curious what you thought of that). I am a big Reinertsen fan as well. His book sets a development program for the next generation IT lifecycle systems I think.
Registered for Reactor14, hope you are still planning on being there.
Charles, good to see you as well. Frankly, I do not recall you sending me anything by Troy Magennis, but I can say I have a high opinion of his work. I will be at Reactor14 and look forward to seeing you there.