What is a Kanban Board?

Kanban board is a workflow visualization tool used in different industries across the world to help improve business processes.

Introduction

Kanban is a Japanese word meaning “visual board” or “sogn”. In industrial terms it stands for a method initially adopted by Toyota to provide more value for the customer without generating more manufacturing costs. It later became popular in industries other than manufacturing as well.

The method was eventually adopted by software companies, mainly in the realm of Agile software development. In our line of work, Kanban stands for a workflow management tool designed to visualise the processes, in the hope of increasing efficiency and productivity.

The concept of Kanban was visualised in the form of a board of activities, called Kanban board which is the beginning block of the detailed system that has become popular today.

The Kanban Board

The Kanban board consists of items in the form of cards which represent a task. The card contains information related to the task such as assignee, description etc.

The cards are arranged in the form of columns where each column represents the stage in the workflow each task is in. The columns may be labelled as broad as “To do”, “In progress”, and “done”, or they may represent a series of different steps in the journey of an item along a pipeline.

In software terms, a card can be any actionable item, or represent an entity that has to pass through different stages until its actualization. For example, it may represent a feature of an application that has to go through development, testing, and deployment, or it may represent a website visitor on the journey from being a contact to a customer.

There are other elements that can be added to the board besides cards and columns, such as swimlanes, but we’ll stick with this introductory structure.

How do Kanban Boards help?

The benefit of a Kanban board lies in its effective description of the workflow. If the different stages are represented properly, the manager should be able to actually observe where there are bottlenecks, which items are taking longer in being processed, and which stages need more focus to progress cards onto the next stage more quickly.

The software implementation of Kanban boards comes with the additional benefits of a dashboard which can give statistics and data about the performance of the system. A quick look at the dashboard will let the administrator see how much time each stage takes to process an item and what is the average time for a card to pass through all the stages etc.

All these insights prompt action to be taken that can increase efficiency and productivity.

Effects of using Kanban Boards

In a standard business setting, Kanban boards have been proven to increase productivity, and minimize additional costs when delivering value to customers. From a software standpoint, the metrics that are accumulated over time can help predict the time needed for delivery of an item for the future based on the data of the past.

What kind of software can benefit from Kanban Boards?

As stated earlier, Kanban has been successfully adopted across a range of industries, though it began in manufacturing. Kanban boards can be a useful visualization tool for all kinds of software from games development to sales and marketing software where they can help qualify leads among other things.

In conclusion, Kanban boards are useful tools that can benefit software companies just as much as a traditional business in visualizing their processes to increase productivity.