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What is a Kanban Board?
A Kanban board is a project management tool for managing workflow. The benefits of this tool lie in making the work visible, committing the team to the right amount of work in progress tasks and maximising efficiency for increased team productivity.
Agreeing to limited number of work-in-progress activities allows the team to focus on what is important. This helps to identify potential bottlenecks and encourages team members to direct more attention on tasks that stall the flow of work. The visual nature of a Kanban board keeps everyone on the same page about tasks, who is responsible for them and their progress in the project cycle.
The Kanban board tool functions successfully under Kanban principles of continuous improvement and collaboration. The workflow should undergo small, incremental changes based on observation of the work and resolving bottlenecks. Therefore, a Kanban board should start by visualising the current process and work being done for any improvements.
Value in Projects
In projects, a Kanban board is used to plan and schedule tasks, allocate resources, and track project progress. It is a versatile tool that is applicable for many project management methodologies such as agile and waterfall.
A Kanban board utilised by an agile team visualises the sprints and iterations of work that is to be completed. It is a tool for implementing agile ways of working by providing the medium for carefully monitoring and improving the flow of work for maximised efficiency. Waterfall teams can leverage Kanban boards to manage their day-to-day work.
Components of a Kanban board
A Kanban board is made up of cards. These cards contain information about the task that is being done and will be organised under columns that break up the stages of a process. Ultimately, the board and its buckets should visualise where the task is within the workflow.
The typical columns for a project include to-do, in progress, and done. Buckets or columns should be titled to suit that specific project’s workflow. A card will move along these columns towards the end as the task gets completed. Another important bucket to have in a Kanban board is the backlog. These are tasks that may not be ready for implementation in the project. It ensures any ideas proposed by team members are not lost, just stored until they can be started on.
Microsoft Teams Planner Kanban Board
The MS Teams Planner app has three views, one of which can be utilised as a digital Kanban board. Cards on the planner board include a description, 20 check list items that can be ticked off, attachments, comments and options to set a priority level, deadline, space for.
Additionally, labels can be added to the cards, with the feature of filtering for cards with certain labels. Other filter options such as sorting by assignment is useful for seeing the tasks that are assigned to a specific individual. Any cards closed at its completion can still be viewed under the collapsed ‘Completed tasks’ in each bucket.
To learn more about how to use MS Planner as a Kanban board watch the video below:
Interested in optimising your project workflows with tools like Kanban boards?
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