This is the first episode of this series: Kanban and Lean.

As stated in the “community of thinkers” we believe individuals should never become the bottleneck to learning. Therefore we have created this list of people we have learned from. While we may not agree with every idea they have, each conversation we have had and each piece of information we have read, has led us to where we are now. When you want to learn about the backgrounds of our ideas we recommend engaging these people, either by reading their publications, books and blogs, following them on twitter and listening and talking with them.

Lean / Kanban

The book that started both our earlier interest in Lean was “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt. Later followed by the writings of Tom and Mary Poppendieck, James Womack and Jeffrey Liker. We enjoy Lean as many of the principles are related with the agile way of thinking. Even though we liked the ideas of Lean we had trouble implementing them in software development.

In 2007 when we were at the Agile 2007 conference we had the pleasure of attending the open space session where David Anderson presented his work with Kanban. This resonated with what Chris had already been doing in the UK as it was very similar. Similarities were caused by following the same influences (Poppendiecks, Eli Goldratt and David himself). It was during a discussion with David immediately after that session that the image of the rope looping through a hole came to Chris for explaining Feature Injection. We are now using that image in the comic book about feature injection.

After the conference, the yahoo group kanban_dev was started. On this list we met many people online that were actively experimenting with Kanban. On the list we met Corey Ladas, Jim Benson, Eric Willeke, Karl Scotland, Kenji Hiranabe and many others.

We have met, shared ideas with and/or learned from many others along the way. We list them in the table below. For your convenience we have listed the names, websites, twitter accounts and books of the people who’s shoulders we are standing on.

Name / Blog	Twitter	Book
David Anderson	@agilemanager	Agile Management for SE
Eric Willeke	@erwilleke
Karl Scotland	@kjscotland
Donald Reinertsen	@dreinertsen	The Principles of Product Development Flow Managing the Design Factory Developing Products in Half the Time
Preston Smith		Flexible Product Development Developing Products in Half the Time
Eli Goldratt		The Goal Critical Chain
Tom and Mary Poppendieck		Lean Software Development Implementing Lean SW Dev.
Taiichi Ohno
James Womack		Lean Thinking Lean Solutions
Kenji Hiranabe	@hiranabe
Dennis Stevens	@dennisstevens
Chris Shinkle	@cmshinkle
Jeffrey Liker		The Toyota Way The Toyota Way Fieldbook
Rob Hathaway	@robhathaway
Benjamin Mitchell	@benjaminm
Liz Keogh	@lunivore
Henrik Kniberg	@henrikkniberg	Scrum and XP from the Trenches
Aaron Sanders	@aremsan
Eric Landes	@ericlandes
Bill Ramos	@billramo
Brandon Carlson	@bcarlso
Brad Appleton
Alan Shalloway	@alshalloway	Lean-Agile Software Development Lean-Agile Pocket Guide
Corey Ladas	@corey_ladas	Scrumban
Jim Benson	@ourfounder
Bob Marshall	@flowchainsensei
Clarke Ching	@clarkeching