Book Club Update: Lean Software Development

The team has completed it's second book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit and continues to benefit. Over the course of roughly eight weeks, we discussed a chapter a week with each team member facilitating at least one chapter.

After the first chapter, entitle "Eliminate Waste", we implemented a change to our weekly team status meeting. That meeting consists of 8 people and traditionally lasted one hour. During our discussion on how to eliminate waste, we decided to utilize a SharePoint Meeting Workspace to maintain a running agenda and trim the meeting to half an hour. This produced a financial savings for the business and has made the team meeting more productive. We calculated the savings as follows:

8 people X 1/2 hour X 50 weeks X $70/hr (allocation rate)

for an annual savings of $14,000

We shared this information with our business sponsors and they

were very impressed with our initiative. They have attended one

of our meetings to see if they can replicate what we have done

throughout their teams. I am very impressed and proud of our

team for continually looking for ways to improve and learn.

Additionally, the team was so encouraged with the results from this book, that we've decided to continue. We will be reading Gung Ho! starting this month. I will provide an update upon completion. As I stated in a previous blog, I encourage every team to incorporate a mentality of continuous learning/improvement and start a book club.