Kanban

 A Kanban board is the key visualization tool for implementing Kanban in your business. A Kanban board is used by any team that uses Kanban for visual management of their work and improving their delivery of products and services in terms of predictability, quality, and time-to-market performance.

A Kanban board can be physical – which is how most teams start using Kanban – or electronic. A typical Kanban board consists of one or more (swim) lanes and multiple columns to depict the workflow process (also referred to as Value Stream) that it is used to manage. A Kanban board represents a “virtual kanban system” used to model the process and track the knowledge work being done by your team.

You can start with a physical Kanban board on a whiteboard/ soft-board or perhaps some large glass windows or partitions in your office. The bigger and more visible they are, the better!

You can start with a basic Kanban board of 3 columns – To Do, Doing and Done – populated with cards that represent work items of different types. However, going by the Kanban maxim of “Start with what you have”, most teams start by modeling their current process which tends to be more elaborate than that.

The columns on the board fall into 3 buckets –

• The to-Do (popularly called the ‘Ready’) column contains all your cards that are next up. Typically, a ready column is placed at the start of the board.
• Doing (or ‘In Progress’) column(s) contains all cards that you are currently working on. You can have multiple Doing columns for each stage of your workflow, as shown above.
• Done column(s) contains all cards that you have finished working on. Depending on the workflow definition, you can have one or more Done columns to collect cards that have completed a specific part of the workflow. You will also typically have a final Done column which might be highlighted uniquely, to indicate that all work on the cards in that column has been completed.
• (In SwiftKanban, we have “Completed” columns to indicate intermediate done stages, and a “Done” column that gets highlighted in green to indicate the final done column.) Additionally, you might have a separate “collection bin or area” called the Backlog where cards are initially created and stored. Similarly, at the other end, you might have an “Archive” bin for keeping the cards that have been Done and are now ‘closed’.

(In SwiftKanban, we have “Completed” columns to indicate intermediate done stages, and a “Done” column that gets highlighted in green to indicate the final done column.) Additionally, you might have a separate “collection bin or area” called the Backlog where cards are initially created and stored. Similarly, at the other end, you might have an “Archive” bin for keeping the cards that have been Done and are now ‘closed’.