Everything you need to know about Kanban boards

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. And visual organization is, of course, crucial to success in any field, from software development to marketing; so the benefits of using a Kanban board as a part of your project management strategy are not to be overlooked.

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.

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What is a Kanban board

A Kanban board is a project management tool that 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.

This tool is part of the Agile Scrum project management framework and is used by Agile teams to visualize workflow and maximize efficiency. You can learn more about the difference between Kanban and Scrum here.

David Anderson’s 5 components of Kanban boards

The Kanban system has significantly evolved since it was developed in the 1940s to help Toyota optimize its manufacturing processes. David Anderson, a pioneer in applying the Kanban system in the software and services industry, played a big role in this. Specifically, he identified five essential components of Kanban boards that are often used today. These include:

• Visual signals: Kanban boards should clearly visualize the workflow and the status of each work item, making it easy to understand the progress and identify potential bottlenecks
• Columns: One of the distinctive features of a Kanban board is the presence of columns, which represent individual tasks or activities that make up a larger workflow. Work items move through these columns until they are finished.
• Work-in-progress (WIP) limits: Limiting the number of work items in progress at any given time helps avoid overloading the team and ensures a smooth and predictable flow of work
• Commitment point: Kanban teams typically maintain a backlog for their board, which serves as a repository for project ideas suggested by customers or team members. The team can select ideas from the backlog when they are ready to work on them. The commitment point is the stage at which the team decides to pick up an idea from the backlog and begin work on the project.
• Delivery point: The delivery point is the ultimate endpoint of a Kanban team’s workflow, which is usually when the product or service is delivered to the customer. The team’s primary objective is to move the work items from the commitment point to the delivery point as quickly as possible, and the time elapsed between these two points is referred to as the Lead Time. Kanban teams consistently strive to improve their processes and minimize Lead Time.

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 is Kanban project management

Kanban project management is a methodology in which a project’s workflow is visualized and broken down into actionable pieces on a Kanban board. Workers in a Kanban team are assigned tasks and focus solely on their own work.

The core principles of Kanban project management

Here are four essential aspects of Kanban project management:

1. Easy implementation

Kanban’s flexibility means that it can be implemented within your existing workflows without being disruptive.

2. Incremental changes

Kanban’s philosophy is based on making incremental changes that revolutionize your workflow rather than radical changes that often lead to doubts and resistance.

3. 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.

4. Inspiring company-wide leadership

Kanban’s “small changes for evolution” philosophy drives all team members towards continuous improvement to reach optimum performance. Execute them all using the Kanban View on monday.com.

When to use a Kanban tool (and when not to)

It’s important to consider if a Kanban tool is the best way to manage your projects. This will depend on the size and preferences of your team, and the specifics of your organization, work, and project.

You can also use these questions in your decision-making process:

How much structure does your team need?

One of the benefits of Kanban is its flexibility— it favors continuous change throughout a project, unlike frameworks like Scrum where you might not be able to make changes during a sprint.

The Kanban system is useful for non-iterative projects where tasks don’t go through phases multiple times. Iterative projects like app feature development, where you might go back to design several times, aren’t ideal for the Kanban framework. While the Kanban framework is used across many industries and disciplines, it works particularly well for organizations that have a continuous workflow such as marketing, events, or publishing.

Do you have a lot of task dependencies?

Kanban works best when each task can be completed within the same team, without too many dependencies. For this reason, it’s not well-suited to complex projects that require multiple tasks, stages, and owners. It also isn’t practical for projects where most tasks require shared resources.

3 benefits of Kanban boards for project management

The Kanban board method provides three key benefits:

1. Boosts focus

Visualizing work with Kanban boards makes it easy for team members to understand their responsibilities and stake in the project. By removing other distractions, an employee can completely focus on their work, knowing that their colleagues are handling everything else.

2. Improves communication

Research shows that most companies struggle with communication, with 32% of people believing that communication with clients and co-workers has become more of a challenge in the past 12 months. 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.

3. Enables effective prioritization

The Pareto principle states that 80% of all outcomes are derived from 20% of cases, pointing to how crucial prioritization is for effective work. By enabling prioritization, Kanban project management makes sure that employees are dedicating their time to tasks that actually move the needle.

How to use a Kanban board to manage your projects in monday.com

1. Create a monday.com board

In order to use the Kanban board system within monday.com, you’ll first need to have a board in your account. To add a new board, click on the “+ Add” button on the left pane on your screen and then select “New Board.”. From the same menu, you can also choose to import a new board from Excel, Google Sheets, Trello, and more, or choose from a pre-prepared template.

2. Add a Kanban view

To add the Kanban View to your board, click on the + option at the top of your board (it will say “Add View” when you hover over it) and select “Kanban”.

You can also add a new board view by clicking on “Board Power-Ups” in the upper right corner of your screen. Select “Board Views” and choose “Kanban” from the Views Center.

3. Set up your Kanban view

Click on the cogwheel icon on the top right of your view to open up the Settings menu.

Follow these steps to set up your Kanban view:

• Kanban column: Select the Status Columns you want to showcase in your Kanban View in the “Kanban Column” section of Settings
• Cover columns: Select one or more Files Columns to be displayed as a cover on your Kanban cards in the “Cover Columns” section
• Card columns: Select the column information from your board that you’d like to have displayed directly on your Kanban cards so you can see this information at a glance
• Divide by groups: Click the “Divide by groups” box at the bottom of your Settings menu to view your Kanban cards according to the groups they belong to on your board

Once your Kanban board is set up, you can easily add new cards, edits card, and move cards.

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4. Move cards along the workflow

After you create your Kanban board, the focus shifts to task completion.

Once a phase of a task is complete, its card is moved to the next column in the Kanban workflow. For example, a writer can complete their draft and move their card to the Review column. An editor can take over from there. If changes are needed, then the task can be moved back to the previous column, and managers/supervisors can use the comments to outline necessary changes.

Kanban boards help managers quickly identify workflow issues since cards in a problem area tend to pile up.

5. Analysis

Project managers can track the average length a card takes to move through the workflow and see how many tasks were finished in a specific time frame.

On monday.com, you can use dynamic templates for more comprehensive metric measurements.