Kanban is a Japanese word meaning sign.
Although it was initially used to manage work in the car assembly lines of Toyota, it has now become a tool used to manage knowledge work. Kanban has two deceptively simple principles:
- Make the work of the team clearly visible
- Limit the amount of work-in-progress
There is a lot of research to support this method. You can see a simple video on Kanban here. We have taken the manual process and added it to our platform.
On one Kanban board in the Platform, you can see:
- All the work of the team as tasks on the board
- Who is accountable for each task via their profile picture
- The status of each task via the columns: To Do, In Progress or Done
- Recent activity via the Activity Feed
- Due dates for each task
That is a huge amount of information on one simple board.
Each task can hold a lot of detail - a description, all the comments, who created the ticket, any updates, due date, other linked items, etc.
Kanban does require discipline from the team to keep this information up to date. Team members can prepare well for meetings by updating and checking their team boards.
Using Kanban tickets to work through the In Progress work during a meeting is a really valuable tool for keeping everyone on track.
You can watch how to use team boards on the video below.
Point of Difference