Define Kanban

Kanban, in simple words, is a manual or digital management tool that gives firms an upper hand by helping them track their activities in real time and enhance the efficiency of the same as well.

Kanban is one of the most adopted project management systems these days. It is an extremely popular methodology among contemporary enterprise and countless organizations.

Kanban comes from the Japanese word for ""billboard"" or ""sign board."" It places strong emphasis on workflow visualization as a means to more productive, efficient, and cooperative teams and organizations. Putting Kanban into practice in your business can drive radical change and long-term benefit to each level of your organization.

What is a Kanban Board?

A Kanban board is one of the devices used in Agile project management to apply visual aids and fixed delivery points, helping to see the work, plan it, track it, and thus optimize a strategy for efficiency.

Some of the industries in which the Kanban board finds application include the following:

• Manufacturing
• Human resource
• DevOps software development
• And many more.

They can be utilized by teams or individual workers only by systematizing and prioritizing their daily work assignments. They are primarily used for certain works with particular needs, but you can create one of your own using either a visual board or a virtual one.

Types of Kanban

Now, let''s discuss the most common two types of Kanban:

Physical Kanban Boards

To create a physical Kanban board, just draw vertical columns on a whiteboard or chalkboard and label each column about your project as a different stage. Let your team know that color-coded sticky notes should be used to represent various activities that need to be completed. Stickies act as visual indicators that make up your process and thus allow you to track progress along with it. A physical Kanban board could work incredibly well for smaller teams or individual use.

Digital Kanban Boards

This could be the case while working on huge teams or where team members are spread over different locations.

With this, digital boards mean that anybody, anywhere, gets to have the same information and a much smoother workflow for all concerned. They are simple to create and faster to update than any physical board.

It can also provide additional, helpful information on how your team is doing in one glance: Information such as the ability to track WIP limits, cumulative flow diagrams, and cycle times, so you can make more informed decisions about what your team needs to keep their workflow smooth.

How Does Kanban Work?

Kanban works according to the following principles:

1. Track Workflow: Another critical aspect of Kanban is having a dashboard, sometimes referred to as a workflow display. The columns on the display usually stand for the sequential steps of your procedure, and the cards contained in these stages represent the activities. You should understand each process that goes into making a product or a system—from concept to completion—before you make your workflow visualization. After you map the current processes, Kanban can help you in the creation of a very detailed visualization of your process. The cards flow through the columns/stages of workflow with completion of jobs by people to identify bottlenecks or places of improvement!
2. Limit Work-in-Progress: The main goal is to eliminate delays by reducing the number of activities in a process. Kanban does so often by putting a limit on the number of concurrent projects; the number of deliverable tasks you''re allowed in each column is your limit, so you move additional jobs forward only if there''s room. That puts the emphasis on single-tasking and reduces waste and inefficiency.
3. Management of Tasks Flow Over People Management: Kanban also values the management in the flow of tasks through the process rather than managing people. This renders more autonomy to the staff members in their respective roles and hence further avoids cases of micromanagement.
4. Clearly Communicate Policies: In approaching collaborative improvement, all team members should understand the new policies of Kanban. Organizations have to define an exact definition of Kanban, publish the guiding principles, and ensure ready access for all those concerned. Introducing each member of a team to the same goal can only strengthen the cohesiveness of a workflow; little is left to misunderstanding or lag.
5. Collaborative Improvements: One of the ways Kanban helps drive lasting organizational change, driven by common insight into the need for improvement, is through the necessity to make workflow improvements that support it. This requires shared insight into the goals and motivation to work toward realization of these goals in a collaborative manner. For instance, a Kanban principle might engage employees to be more inspired and perhaps take more initiative in working together to help decrease the number of items they are all working on at any given time.

Voila! That''s all you need to know about Kanban.