Kanban methodology: everything you need to know

Ask any project manager, director, or high-level manager, “what makes or breaks a successful project?” and they’ll tell you it’s working with people that care.

Every project needs a champion. And if that endorser stops caring, then the project typically dies. The secret to keeping people enthusiastic about your project is holding up the vision of the finished product and making it feel attainable. That’s what Kanban brings to the table.

Read on to find out what Kanban project management is, its core principles, benefits, and how you can use it for your projects with monday.com.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a popular project management framework used to implement agile principles or agile methodology and used by agile teams to visualize workflow and maximize efficiency.

Read also our guide to Agile project management.

The Kanban method is founded on real-time communication, full transparency of work, and visual organization of progress. It’s most well-known for its use within DevOps software development. However, it can be used across all types of business teams.

What are the origins of Kanban?

Kanban came about in the 1940s in Japan. An engineer and businessman, Taiichi Ohno was working at Toyota Automotive in Japan when he created his simple Kanban system. That grew into a lean manufacturing system meant to optimally control processes, monitor inventory levels, and manage work at each stage of the production process.

Kanban (看板) is the Japanese word for “signboard,” which is a way of saying it’s a “visual signal.” Its most common form manifests through a Kanban board with Kanban cards on top showing individual tasks grouped by status.

What is a Kanban board

A Kanban board is often summed up as the evolution of sticky notes and dry-erase markers: an organizational system that keeps your team members informed about task assignments, due dates, and any other relevant information in one, visually intuitive place.

A Kanban board consists of a series of cards and columns representing individual tasks and their stages. For example, stages could refer to the status of the task and be titled “pending,” “to-do,” “work in progress,” or “completed.” Each card is assigned to a team member who’s responsible for completing the task and moving the card from one column to the next until the project is completed.

What are the key elements of a Kanban board

Whether it’s a physical system made with Post-it notes or a digital board, part of project management software, any Kanban board will have the following components:

1. Columns: These are the various stages of the team’s workflow, such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done,” and they are visualized as columns on the board.
2. Cards: These are individual units of work, such as tasks or projects, that move through the workflow stages on the board.
3. Work-in-progress (WIP) limits: These are the maximum number of work items that can be in each workflow stage at any given time.
4. Swimlanes: Swimlanes are horizontal divisions that can be utilized to separate and categorize various activities, such as by team or department.
5. Tags: Card tags, also known as labels, are a convenient and efficient method for categorizing, arranging, and filtering your cards, providing context, emphasizing critical tasks, and assisting in locating the tasks that require attention to achieve particular objectives.

What are the 4 foundational principles of Kanban?

Here are the four essential aspects of Kanban project management:

Easy implementation: Kanban’s flexibility means that it can be implemented within your existing workflows without being disruptive. Kanban implementation shouldn’t feel hard. Simply lay it over what you’re doing today and see how things go for a while.

Incremental changes: Instead of making sweeping or radical changes, try keeping your current production level and style exactly as is and focus on gradual changes at a comfortable pace over time. Doing so will lead to less internal resistance.

Respect for current processes and roles: The Kanban methodology doesn’t bulldoze your existing process and roles. It allows the project team to decide and implement changes where needed. Over time, the team will gradually identify and make any changes or tweaks needed to the current process.

Inspiring company-wide leadership: An effective Kanban system will encourage constant improvement throughout all levels of the organization. Leadership can come from anywhere on the team since everyone has the potential to share great ideas, implement monumental changes, and find ways to improve the way you work and deliver products and services.

The 6 fundamental practices of Kanban methodology

Now that we’ve broken down each Kanban principle, it’s time to dive into what Kanban looks like in action. Here are the 6 core practices of an effective Kanban system:

1. Find a way to visualize your workflow

The Kanban tool works best when there’s a visual board full of Kanban cards you can drag around. You can use a whiteboard, an office wall with sticky notes on it, or an electronic Kanban system in the form of software. Visualizing the process with a Kanban board facilitates transparency and gives your team an easily understood method of getting things done.

monday.com has a built-in Kanban data visualization, so your team always has access to the Kanban board and its corresponding Kanban cards.

2. Limit all Work in Progress (WIP)

The Kanban method is a pull system that encourages your team to complete their work before taking on new tasks. Doing so provides a sense of focus for the team and signals to stakeholders that there’s a limited capacity for each team that should be carefully considered.

At any given time, you shouldn’t see more than 1 or 2 items under the “in-progress” or “doing” heading for each person. Once a work item card moves over to “done,” they can pull an item from “to-do” to “doing” and repeat the process.

3. Manage the workflow

A critical aspect of the Kanban system is observing your workflow and ensuring production levels see continuous improvement. Ultimately, that means identifying bottlenecks in your process and carefully monitoring how long work items sit in various stages.

If work is piling up — or staying in handoff stages too long —you may need to make adjustments. With time, your team’s flow will improve and the delivery process becomes more smooth and predictable.

4. Provide structure to your process policies

Defining process policies more precisely will make everyone’s job easier. You’re essentially creating a framework for “how to work” that everyone understands and feels good about.

Using the Kanban methodology, this process policy creation starts with creating common checklists for each work type, defining task completion, creating detailed descriptions of columns or swim lanes, identifying when to pull cards, and how much WIP is acceptable.

5. Find time to review and provide feedback

Implementing feedback loops is an integral part of an effective Kanban system. Feedback loops help your team “fail fast” and “fail often,” which sounds counterintuitive but is an ingenious way of getting closer to creating a foolproof work system.

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It’s better to identify if you’re on the right track early than continue down the same path for weeks, months, or even years. Some easy ways to create feedback loops are to schedule regular reviews of the process and set up key tracking metrics that keep an eye on the flow of work.

6. Improve and evolve using the scientific method

The Kanban method helps you adapt to change and improve at a gradual pace that everyone can handle. It also encourages the use of the scientific method — which has you form a hypothesis, test it, and make changes based on your test outcome.

As you make changes and repeat the test, your system should grow stronger, and the impact you make grows larger.

What are the benefits of Kanban?

Here are some of the main benefits you can expect when implementing Kanban project management:

• Improves communication: An online Kanban board facilitates better communication as team members gain a better understanding of project needs. The ability to add comments to cards also helps with this.
• Enables effective prioritization:  Kanban project management makes sure that employees are dedicating their time to tasks that actually move the needle.
• Allows for transparency: Kanban’s greatest strength is bringing visibility to the previously invisible — specifically, bottlenecks hindering processes. In fact, 59% of project managers think visualizing processes with Kanban is essential to implementing Agile.
• Makes resource allocation efficient: With a Kanban board, you can visually view each team member’s task load and allocate resources across the staff.
• Enables continuous improvement: The more you use Kanban, the more you knock down roadblocks and bottlenecks throughout your processes.