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AGILEAN's Recommended Reading

Andersen, Björn; Business Process Improvement Toolbox, ASQ Quality Press, 1999

Many books refer to various charting techniques and tools for performance improvement. This book gives you the details on what they are, how they work, and how you can best use them within your organization.

Goldratt, Eliyahu and Jeff Cox; The Goal, North River Press, 1992

The Theory of Constraints explained using a quick read story telling approach. Streamline operations by focusing on end-to-end throughput, not individual efficiency, and by identifying bottlenecks and providing alternatives for their elimination.

Imai, Masaaki; Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management, McGraw-Hill, 1997

A good book for listing out the things you should be thinking about as you begin to address continuous performance improvement within your organization. The book has a manufacturing focus, but the way the information is presented, these Lean Management techniques are readily transferable to the services industry.

Juran, Joseph; Juran’s Quality Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1998

Unlike many books this size, its value is far more than a door stop. If you are going to buy more than one book on quality, this is the book for you. For those of you that believe a book on quality is only of interest to people with that in their title, this is the book for you. And for those of you that think there is only one true quality dogma, this is the book for you. An excellent and balanced treatment of the subject that leaves you with the understanding that "quality" really suffers from a poor marketing image. There is more depth behind the quality movement than many realize.

Rother, Mike and John Shook; Learning to See, The Lean Enterprise Institute, 1998

A simple straight-forward method of mapping out the value stream (or work flow) of an organization. The book has a heavy manufacturing focus, but the approach produces easy to draw and easy to understand maps of value added work flowing through the organization. The fact that they are easy to draw differentiates this approach from others. They make it easy to see areas for performance improvement.

Schwaber, Ken and Mike Beedle; Agile Software Development with Scrum, Prentice Hall, 2002

The comment heard most frequently about applying manufacturing productivity improvement techniques to services businesses, is that they don't apply to ad-hoc environments. They only work in assembly line environments, not in job shops where every task is different. This book applies Lean Management techniques to software development. If they work in the software world, they will work anywhere.

Organizations are non-linear complex systems.  Building high performance organizations that are both effective and efficient requires system thinking - and expanding how we think about the complex interactions of any value stream.  This book provides a perspective to organizational modeling that will eventually change how we all manage our businesses.

Treacy, Michael and Fred Wiersema; The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow your Focus, Dominate Your Market, Perseus Publishing, 1997

Focus is easy to say, hard to do. It is difficult to turn away from what appear to be opportunities behind every door. As the title says, this book describes a method for evaluating multiple customer market strategies with the goal of establishing focused market differentiation.

Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos; The Machine that Changed the World, Rawson Associates, 1990

This book documents a revolution impacting business performance that started over 50 years ago. Since the Lean Management revolution started in manufacturing, not many people in the services business have heard about it yet, but the techniques apply. Those in a services industry that have heard about it, and are acting on it, are building a competitive advantage that laggards will find difficult to overtake.  Read this book, join the revolution, and don't be left behind.

Womack, James P. and Daniel T. Jones; Lean Thinking, Simon & Schuster, 1996

Lean is the name used within the USA for the group of management techniques described in the book "The Machine the Changed the World." As many have pointed out, this book is the bible on Lean performance improvement techniques. Enough said.

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