by Aarti Bhatt | Jun 10, 2021 | Leadership Tribe
Kanban board is one of the agile project management tools used by remote teams and in-office agile teams. Putting your tasks on the Kanban board and envisioning/visualizing the workflow helps teams better understand the procedures and obtain an overview of the workload. It helps in removing useless and wasteful information. You can quickly identify the problematic work stages, and your team will work efficiently.
Over the internet, you will find many kanban board examples, but how you will identify which methodology is suitable for you? What are the best ways to use the kanban tool, and how do successful project managers utilize the online Kanban boards?
If you have no answers, we’ll figure this out together and discuss the necessary details, whether you are a pro or beginner.
Keep Calm, and Let’s do Kanban Board!
What is a Kanban System?
As per the principles of Kanban, it is a method of scheduling that boosts the visual use of the imagination to organize the task work in advance, pre-planned deliveries, and much more. The name of the Kanban system is created and derived from the Kanban Cards that tracks the production. You can improve the workflow consistency and offer reliable yet faster delivery to clients by confining the work in progress (WIP) and applying specific policies in the team.
As mentioned before, Kanban is a project management tool that processes improvement methods. Software teams use kanban boards to enhance the efficiency in software development. The primary purpose of the Kanban system is to eradicate the bottlenecks and backlogs in the workflow.
What is a Kanban Board?
A method of work management that utilizes a digital kanban board or physical board with cards and columns is known as Kanban Board. The columns organize the tasks with the help of their present stage or progress in the development; on the other hand, cards represent the tasks.
Kanban is a Japanese word that means Billboard. Toyota developed this concept in the 1940s to execute just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing. Nowadays, this to-do tool is used in almost every industry but most notably used by the software development teams. Agile teams use this tool due to its visual interface, ease of use to reduce work, and immediately seeing what everyone is working on. Plus, it offers visual signals into the task’s progress and what a particular task is holding up in the project.
Elements of the Kanban Board
Kanban boards use the WIP limits, cards, columns, and swimlanes to manage the workflows and allow the team to visualize effectively.
- Kanban Cards: These cards represent the tasks visually, and each card has information about the task and its status, including assignee name, description, and deadline for the work.
- Work in progress limits: This helps limit the maximum number of tasks in different workflow stages as restricting the WIP allows you to complete the work items faster by limiting the team to focus on the present tasks.
- Swimlanes: The horizontal lanes you can use to split the different activities, services, teams, and more.
- Columns: Every column on the board depicts the workflow at different stages, and the cards have all the workflow mentioned until their completion.
How does a Kanban Board work?
This task management board works by charting the work items to digital or physical sticky notes placed into the columns on larger boards. The columns of boards portray a value stream- specific products or steps sequence that must go through from start to finish. The work items are written on the cards and then positioned in their columns.
For different types of work items, cards of different colours are used, whereas swimlanes are used to organize the workings of the team on one board. Also, WIP limits are placed on the few columns’ capacities to make sure the flow of work is smooth, and team members pull the cards and shift them through columns from left to right with the progress of work.
Columns of the Kanban Board
A typical Kanban board has three sections/column:
- To Do
This section has all the tasks that need to be done. The task initialization is done based on the task conceptualization. Then the task is added to the column and the lead time starts when the tasks are added to the To-do column.
- Work-In-Progress
This column has those tasks that are currently are in development by the specific team members. The amount of time required in-progress stage is called the “Cycle Time”.
- Done
Now, the tasks that are in progress are completed and delivered. The amount of time invested in the whole task, i.e. from initialization to the done stage, is known as “lead time”.
Kanban Method
Different methods of using the Kanban board, and different teams customize it according to their workflow. But these are some of the typical steps of using the Kanban Board:
- Determine and visualize the workflow of your team. After defining the workflow, your team can imagine the work so everyone can follow.
- In the second step, break the workflow into different stages by personalizing the Kanban chart and splitting the workflow into more small stages. This way, you will capitalize on the team’s efforts to achieve the tasks successfully.
- Always consider each stakeholder input and use the stakeholder mapping to know whom the most important people are involved.
- Make sure all the stakeholders understand each stage as due to the workflow openness, each member can recognize who is working on what task in each separate stage only by looking at their Kanban Board.
- You can enhance the flow of work by limiting the work in progress. By implementing the real-time metrics, you can work together with the team members to predict future problems.
- In the last step, you can measure effectiveness by tracking the flow, lead time, and quality of the task by comparing it with the other criteria. Plus, in the whole process, the metrics should be analyzed.
Conclusion
No doubt, kanban boards are the true saviour when it comes to project management. This board can help manage tasks, organize the work items, enhance the quality and time of delivery, and optimize the team’s efficiency. There are many kanban project management software available in the market like Trello, Jira and kanban tool that helps the management to work effectively.
by Aarti Bhatt | Jun 9, 2021 | Leadership Tribe
Kanban is a prevailing system used to execute DevOps and agile software development. It involves fully transparent working and real-time information of capacity. Kanban boards display work items to let the team members see the work they need to do whenever they want.
In other words, Kanban is a system that provides visual means of managing work when it moves from one level to another in a given process. It visualises the workflow and the actual work passing through. Kanban aims to identify and fix the potential bottlenecks in the process, so the overall workflow is throughput or cost-effective at optimal speed.
Kanban in Software Development
Nowadays, agile software development teams can leverage the usual Just-in-time (JIT) principles by corresponding the amount of work-in-progress (WIP) to the team’s capacity. It offers continuous improvement by providing them with flexible options for planning, clearer focus, quick output, and precision during the development cycle.
An Agile Methodology
The one thing that distinguishes Kanban from Scrum is that it is not iterative. In contrast, Scrum processes have short iterations, which clones a project lifecycle on a smaller scale with a clear beginning and ending for each iteration. Kanban is an agile methodology that allows software development in one considerable cycle time.
Kanban fulfils all twelve principles of the Agile manifesto as it is incremental, not iterative. Since there are no Kanban project iterations, it has no defined beginning or ending for each work item. In this way, the work items can initiate and terminate independently and have no pre-determined period.
How Does it Work?
Kanban utilises the phases in the software development lifecycle to illustrate the stages of the development process. Each phase has a limited capacity for work at any one time. There is a prioritised requirements list from which a small work item is created; the list usually elaborates the requirements. This work item won’t be allowed to move on to the next lifecycle phase until some space opens up ahead.
Developers can control the number of active tasks at any one time, so they approach the project incrementally and have an opportunity to apply agile principles.
Work in Progress (WIP) Limits
While understanding the working of Kanban methodology, it is essential to know that these projects have WIP limits that specify the capacity of each work item. In this way, the development team focuses on a small amount of work at one time. Once a task is finished, only then the new one will be pulled into the cycle. WIP limits need to be upgraded by comparing the actual and expected effort for finished tasks.
Kanban Boards
Kanban boards make it easier for the teams to visualise their work and optimise the workflow among the team members. Like any other physical boards used by teams for projects, virtual boards are used for easy collaboration, accessibility from different locations, and traceability in agile software development.
Kanban Cards
In each kanban board, there are kanban cards that illustrate each work item separately. Kanban is a term of Japanese meaning “visual signal”. Using kanban cards, the team members can track the progress in a highly visual manner with the flow of work.
These cards contain critical information of a particular work item, showing the team members what needs to be done, who is in charge of it, how long would it take, and so on. It helps with the overall project management process and makes it efficient.
Benefits of Kanban Methodology in Agile Software Development
These days Kanban method is the most well-known methodologies exploited by agile teams due to its numerous benefits and throughput for teams of any size. Here are some of its most outstanding services:
● Planning Flexibility
By applying the kanban methodology, the team remains focused only on the tasks that are actively in progress. When a work item is concluded, they take the next work item from the top of the backlog and starts working on it. The product owner decides to prioritise the work items on backlog and reprioritise them without disrupting the team. When the prioritisation of the work items is done accurately, the team will provide continuous delivery for the project completion, which takes us to our next benefit of the Kanban method, continuous delivery.
● Continuous Delivery
It is the method of frequently delivering work to the clients. On the other hand, continuous integration is developing and analysing code gradually around the day. Together, they configure a CI/CD pipeline, helping the development teams (mostly DevOps teams) ship high-quality software in less time.
● Optimised Cycle time
Cycle time is a crucial aspect for kanban teams. It is the amount of time a work item takes to travel through the workflow from the start till it ships. With shortened cycle time, the kanban team can predict the completion of forthcoming work with surety.
● Fewer Bottlenecks
The more work items are piled up and done simultaneously, the more content switching occurs, becoming a barrier to project completion. Multitasking can reduce efficiency in the project management process. Work-in-progress limits in the kanban method highlight the bottlenecks and reserves piled up in the process because of the lack of skill sets, attention or team members. In this way, the kanban teams limit the work in progress to make the process more efficient.
● Visual Metrics
Another advantage of the kanban system is that it offers visual metrics for strong focus that ultimately improves the kanban team’s efficiency and effectiveness. This visualisation practice makes it easier for team members to spot any bottleneck or sprint backlog and remove it. In this agile method, the Kanban teams utilise control charts and cumulative flow diagrams to enhance the overall functionality.
Wrapping Up
The agile manifesto for software development has changed the way companies plan, design, test, and deliver software. Eliminating the traditional methods, agile product development methods are now accepted by almost all software companies. Kanban methodology is a widely used agile product development methodology, and it is replacing scrum due to its additional benefits and functionality.
