Kanban Part 2 — How to Get Started With Kanban

Kanban is a lightweight agile approach for organizing work. This post explores how to get started with Kanban.

This post is the second in a series on Kanban, a lightweight agile approach for organizing work. In our previous post we answered the question, what is Kanban and why do people use it. In this post, we are going to explore how to get started with Kanban.

We have two options to getting started. Option 1 is a quick and easy way to get started with Kanban. Option 2 is a more involved and deliberate approach.

Option 1: The Quick Way to Get Started with Kanban

The fastest and simplest way to get started with Kanban is to make sticky notes or cards for all the work that you and your team are doing and put it on a whiteboard. You could also do the same exercise using one of the many online Kanban tools like Jira, Trello, or Leankit.

Organize all that current work on the whiteboard in columns representing the activities that you perform, from initial request all the way through done. You could even keep it super simple and create 3 columns for the work: To Do, In Progress, and Done as shown in the example below.