Kanban is a process management system, inspired by the Toyota Production System, that allows people working with non-physical production lines to visualise their workflow.
In simple terms, it allows you to see the process that you use to do a task or project. This is incredibly useful to industries like marketing, design and software development where the production line isn’t a physical object in a factory that you can look at.
How is that different from a to-do list?
If you’re building cars in a factory, you can see the whole process with your eyes and evaluate where the issues are. You can judge where you need more staff, where you need less staff, and what tasks you can automate.
Kanban allows the industries that create non-physical products to assess their production line and see where the bottlenecks occur. A to-do list can’t help you judge if you need more designers for the advertising department, where the biggest time-sink is for each project, or how to effectively automate the grunt work.
The Kanban Board
The Kanban board is a tool used to follow this Kanban system. It visualises the process effectively, allowing you to keep track of what your current workflow looks like and audit the process afterwards to find the inevitable bottlenecks.
To do this, Kanban boards use a series of ‘cards’ to note tasks. Those cards are then grouped in columns to show which stage of the production line they’re currently in.
The complexity of how the columns are laid out depends on how much micro-management of the production line you’re looking for. It could be anything from a simple 3 column series of “To-do”, “Doing”, and “Done” to a complex 156 column behemoth that tracks every moment of the product’s production cycle.
Effective Boards
An effective, modern Kanban board can be presented in many ways with many different features. The key feature you’ll need, before any bells-and-whistles are added, is collaboration.
Team members will appreciate the fact you have introduced a Kanban into your workflow if it allows them to perform their jobs better and more easily collaborate. Assigning cards to team members, linking files and messages to cards and linking cards to internal chats are some great ways for your Kanban to increase it’s usability for your staff.
Kanban Services.
There are many Kanban services that fit very different requirements. Trello is a great starting point for users looking for a free Kanban board but has problems scaling to the enterprise level, for example.
The Kanban we currently use is a self-hosted solution that integrates with our cloud storage (for easy file sharing) and internal chat (great for linking your conversations and your production line). We’ve found that it works great for remote-working in tandem with the cloud storage and chat integrations.
The only way to find the one you like, is to try them. I’d suggest even starting as simple as drawing a Kanban board on a whiteboard to get familiar with the process. This will allow you to form a more cohesive opinion and pick the best option for your company/team.
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