If you care about improving the way you do Web Development, read one of these books this Christmas

I think that all of these books are important and useful reads for anyone interested in improving the way that they manage web development projects. Of course, if you just want the distilled best bits. You could always come on my "Building the Lean Web Development Team" course on 20th January 2010 ;-)

1. Organisation Man - James Whyte

If you're not self-employed, they you're in an organisation.  And if even if you are self-employed, you have to deal with organisations.  One of the things that I'm looking for in a non-fiction book is a completely different perspective that suggests to me a different set of actions for dealing with the problems that I face. I think this was the one that made me realise just how different talking to organisations was from talking to people.

2. The Toyota Production System – Taiichi Ohno

A fantastic book.  Here's a man who really knew about car factories.  But it has so much to teach anybody who is trying to do anything complicated in business.  You get the feeling that the car factory, and beyond it, its customers and its suppliers had become somehow wired into his brain, that whenever anything went wrong he felt it instantly.

3. Learned Optimism – Martin E. P. Seligman

Don't give up. Some people never give up, and those are the people who when bad things happen to them ascribe problems to the system rather than themselves.

4. Scrum and XP from the Trenches -  Henrik Kniberg

The sanest, least dogmatic book about how to do Agile that you'll ever read.

5. Freedom from Command and Control Rethinking Management for Lean Service - John Seddon

If software is a service, then maybe you need to know about how Lean works in a service industry environment.  When I first heard about the concepts of ″value demand″ and ″failure demand″ it was like somebody had turned the light on whilst playing the Hallelujah chorus.  If you're involved in web development or writing software, or getting web development done, or procuring software, you need to know about this stuff.

6. Lean Thinking – Womack and Jones

Fascinating follow-up to ″The Machine that Changed the World″.  Some really interesting case studies of engineering firms that have adopted lean processes and a good account of the idea of a value streams.  Some of the ideas in here (and particularly the way they've been sold as consultancy) have been criticised by Seddon, but this, and their previous book are still the best descriptions of Lean for a Western audience.

7. Getting Things Done by David Allen

Have a system to capture everything. Have a system for know what to do with everything once you've captured it.  Do it.  Simple huh?

8. Difficult Conversations by Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

To quote Stephen R. Covey – whose books didn't make it to this list.  ″Seek first to be understand, then to be understood″.

9. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

Explore the value landscape. Oh, you mean values, like those you try to put in a stream in Lean? Yes. Find out the importance of a wise deal and why such behaviour as ″trading on positions″ and ″low-balling″ are such a bad idea.

10. Zero Quality Control by Shigeo Shingo

Another book about the Toyota Production System, and other examples of manufacturing in Japan.  I thought that I would be bored/put off by the actual mechanical examples.  But this is such an intelligent book that

For further information, contact mark.stringer@gmail.com (07736 807 604)