Making Workflows Transparent: Visualizing Progress With Kanban
Visualizing Workflows with Kanban Boards
A Kanban board is a visual project management tool that allows teams to view tasks, track progress, and optimize workflows. Kanban boards use columns to represent different stages of a workflow, with cards or sticky notes moving across the board from left to right to show progress. This provides transparency into bottlenecks, blockers, work-in-progress limits, and cycle times. Key benefits of Kanban boards include flexibility, visibility, and continuous improvement.
Key Principles of Kanban
There are four main principles of Kanban that serve as the foundation for Kanban boards and methodology:
- Visualize the workflow – Mapping out every stage of work on a Kanban board allows teams to see their process and identify issues.
- Limit work-in-progress – Having agreed upon limits for how much unfinished work can exist in each column keeps teams focused.
- Manage flow – By focusing on work-in-progress limits and moving items across the board, teams can optimize cycle times.
- Continuous improvement – Reviewing metrics, processes, and policies regularly allows for incremental enhancements over time.
Setting Up a Kanban Board
Choosing a Tool
When selecting a Kanban tool, consider ease of use, collaboration features, analytics/reporting, board flexibility, and integrations. Leading tools include Trello, Jira, Azure Boards, LeanKit, and Monday.com. Physical boards with sticky notes can also be effective for small teams.
Defining Columns
Kanban columns represent each phase of your workflow. Typical stages include “To Do,” “In Progress,” “Code Review,” “Testing,” and “Done.” Define columns that match your team’s process. Resist overcomplicating the board while ensuring necessary steps are visible.
Adding Tasks
Kanban cards contain descriptions of work tasks and requirements. Outline just enough details to allow assignment and tracking. Link cards to other systems for supplementary information. Tasks should move through columns as they progress, with work-in-progress limits maintaining focus.
Tracking Progress Visually
Moving Tasks Between Columns
As tasks are worked on, team members should transition them across the Kanban board columns. This visual workflow allows everyone to see what is coming up, what is being handled currently, and where issues or blockers may exist based on card movement (or lack thereof).
Focusing on Work-in-Progress Limits
By setting work-in-progress (WIP) limits, teams can control the amount of unfinished work in each column. This keeps the focus on finishing existing tasks before starting new ones. Optimizing WIP limits helps balance utilization and flow.
Making Blockers Visible
If a task is stuck in a column for too long, it may have a dependency or blocker. Kanban boards allow these issues to become visually evident so they can be addressed – highlighted with colors, labels, comments, etc.
Getting Team Buy-in
Communicating Benefits
Explain the core benefits of Kanban to teams, focusing on enhanced focus, visibility, collaboration, and metrics. Emphasize how the Kanban board will help teams improve and optimize their ways of working.
Addressing Concerns
Discover initial hesitations teams have about using a Kanban board and be ready to discuss them. Offer reassurance around additional work required, meetings added, and changes to approaches. Share examples of transitions to ease worries.
Leading by Example
As the Kanban evangelist, be the first to use the board, transition tasks across columns, identify blockers, and highlight benefits. Model the behaviors you want teams to adopt. Early enthusiasm and excitement is contagious.
Integrating with Other Systems
Linking Board to Backlogs
Connect your Kanban board to your project management tool’s backlogs using integrations or IDs to track hierarchical progress. This allows larger initiatives to be broken into board tasks without losing visibility at the epic/story/defect levels.
Updating Dashboards Automatically
Utilize automatic data syncing to populate leadership dashboards and centralized reporting from the Kanban board. This keeps key metrics like cycle times, throughput, WIP limits and bottlenecks up-to-date across systems.
Improving Processes Continuously
Reviewing Metrics Regularly
Analyze Kanban metrics like cycle time, workflow steps, throughput, and WIP limits on a consistent basis to spot inefficiencies. Look at trends over time, comparing before/after certain changes to see their impact.
Tuning Policies Based on Data
As potential process enhancements are identified through metrics reviews, pilot policy changes on the board to validate. Examples include altering WIP limits, adding new columns, changing prioritization schemes.
Promoting a Culture of Improvement
Encourage teams to suggest improvement ideas based on their usage of the Kanban board. Celebrate implemented enhancements and optimized processes. Evolution and enhancements over time ensure growing maturity.
