Understanding Kanban

Kanban Project Management is a system developed by Toyota back in 1940 in order to guarantee that the assembly line never stopped. The idea was that if the line was designed in a way that the work was predictable and based on a chain reaction everything would run smoothly. Curiously enough, this method was developed by monitoring the way supermarkets kept their shelves stocked. When a shelf item is sold, a stock boy would notice a gap and restock the shelf from the market warehouse. This, in turn, shows up as a drop in inventory levels in the warehouse which prompts ordering further stocks from the supplier. In other words, the process of a client purchasing an item from a supermarket will trigger a chain reaction that will guarantee that the market will never run out of supplies. This in its essence is the Kanban method. The identification of a series of steps that trigger each other to lead to the desired outcome.

The Kanban method also allows for the detection of problems very early on and prevents them from being a major roadblock in the future. It is called a JIT (just-in-time) method of management because it allows for work to be done on multiple elements at the same time while also allowing for prompt action to fix mishaps.

The Kanban system has 3 main pillars:

1. Boards
2. Lists
3. Cards

The Kanban Board

A Kanban board is the entire project being planned. It is an overview of what is happening at every step of the system. A Kanban board can be something as simple as a whiteboard with sticky notes on it, or a complex app with multiple levels and complex features.

Some people make the board an overview of all the projects in progress, but that is not recommended. The reason being that any project has multiple phases, each of which has a specific headline or task. By using more than one project on a single board you are decreasing your available workspace for each project.

The List

A list in a Kanban system is just a grouping of tasks under a specific headline. A very popular way of creating Kanban lists is:

• To do
• Doing
• Done

This is a very good general method of organizing simple projects that have a very specific and clear workflow. Though just to be clear a Kanban list can be organized any way a project needs. Let’s take a marketing campaign as a sample project. My lists, in this case, would be some variation of the below:

• CreativeTo Do
• Done
• DeploymentTo Do
• Done
• Analytics and ReportingTo Do
• Done

As you can see in the sample above, my project would have 3 main lists, with two sub-lists in each. That’s because each one of the main lists has a specific set of Tasks and Sub-tasks that need to be done. By visualizing the entire process at such a granular level, I would be able to understand where my bottlenecks occur and redeploy my resources accordingly.

Modern project management apps allow you to manage that either by using a list, sub-list system, or by allowing you to add subtasks to each task. That way no single task is done until its subtasks are done.

The Card

Cards are the actual tasks within each list. They are what needs to be done specifically. As the project develops and moves forward, the card will move to the board accordingly. This will help the people involved to visualize the process taking place without the need to analyze mountains of data from the start. By monitoring A simple look at a Kanban bard you would know instantly what is right and what is wrong, and most importantly where are the bottlenecks.

For more information on the Kanban Method check out the full article on https://loweryourcosts.org/project-management/understanding-kanban/