A kanban board is one of the tools that can be used to implement

kanban Kanban ( Japanese: カンバン and Chinese: 看板, meaning signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing (also called just-in-time manufacturing, abbreviated JIT). Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, devel ...

to manage work at a personal or organizational level. Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Cards are moved from left to right to show progress and to help coordinate teams performing the work. A kanban board may be divided into horizontal "swimlanes" representing different kinds of work or different teams performing the work. Kanban boards can be used in

knowledge work Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "thin ...

or for manufacturing processes. Simple boards have columns for "waiting", "in progress", and "completed" or "to-do", "doing", and "done". Complex kanban boards can be created that subdivide "in progress" work into multiple columns to visualise the flow of work across a whole value stream map.

Applications

Kanban can be used to organize many areas of an organization and can be designed accordingly. The simplest kanban board consists of three columns: "to-do", "doing" and "done", though some additional detail such as WiP limits are needed to fully support the Kanban Method. Business functions that use kanban boards include: * Kanban board for software development team. A popular example of a kanban board for agile or

lean software development Lean software development is a translation of lean manufacturing principles and practices to the software development domain. Adapted from the Toyota Production System, it is emerging with the support of a pro-lean subculture within the agil ...

consists of: Backlog, Ready, Coding, Testing, Approval, and Done columns. It is also a common practice to name columns in a different way, for example: Next, In Development, Done, Customer Acceptance, Live. * Kanban for marketing teams * Kanban for HR teams * Personal task management or "personal kanban"Willeke, Marian HH. "Agile in Academics: Applying Agile to Instructional Design." Agile Conference (AGILE), 2011. IEEE, 2011. *Kanban for accounting teams. Usually consists of columns: new items, ready for distribution, in progress, and completed.

Notable tools

* Asana, with boards *

Azure DevOps Server Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) is a Microsoft product that provides version control (either with Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) or Git), reporting, requirements management ...

, an integrated ALM-platform for managing work in and across multiple teams. *

CA Technologies CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

Rally, provides teams with the option of managing pull-based, lean software development projects. *

Evernote Evernote is a note-taking and task management application. It is developed by the Evernote Corporation, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It is intended for archiving and creating notes in which photos, audio and saved web content can ...

. * Jira, provides kanban boards. * Kanboard, open source kKanban-based project management software *

Microsoft Planner Microsoft Planner is a planning application available on the Microsoft 365 platform. The application is available to premium, business, and educational subscribers to Microsoft 365. Microsoft Planner is a team-work oriented tool that can be use ...

, a planning application available on the Microsoft Office 365 platform. *

Monday.com Monday.com (styled in lowercase as monday.com) is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create their own applications and project management software. The product was launched in 2014 and in July 2019, the company raised $150 million, ...

, a cloud-based platform that allows users to create their own applications and work management software. *

Notion Notion or Notions may refer to: Software * Notion (music software), a music composition and performance program * Notion (productivity software), a note-taking and project-management program from Notion Labs Inc. * Notion (window manager), the s ...

, a project management and database application includes kanban board views. *

Odoo Odoo is a suite of business management software tools including, for example, CRM, e-commerce, billing, accounting, manufacturing, warehouse, project management, and inventory management. During Odoo experience which took place in Belgium i ...

, an open-source ERP and CRM, provides kanban boards for most apps. * Pivotal Tracker provides kanban boards *

Projektron BCS Projektron BCS is a web-based project management software for planning, managing and controlling a multitude of projects simultaneously.{{cite book , author=Dr. Frederik Ahlemann , author2=Kristin Backhaus , title = Project Management Sof ...

, project management tool, provides kanban boards for tickets and tasks *

ServiceNow ServiceNow is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. Founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, ServiceNow is listed on the ...

platform, offers kanban style visual task boards. *

Trello Trello is a web-based, kanban-style, list-making application and is developed by Trello Enterprise, a subsidiary of Atlassian. Created in 2011 by Glitch, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in New York City in 2014 and sold ...

, cards-based project management. * Tuleap, agile open source tool for development teams: customize board columns, set WIP (Work In Progress), connect board with Issue Trackers, Git, Documents *

Twproject Twproject (say: T W Project) is a web-based project and groupware management tool created by Open Lab, an Italian software house founded in 2001. It won the 17th Jolt Productivity Award in 2007 in the project management category. In March 2019 i ...

(formerly Teamwork), project and groupware management tool. *

Unicom Focal Point UNICOM Focal Point is a portfolio management and decision analysis tool used by the product organizations of corporations and government agencies to collect information and feedback from internal and external stakeholders on the value of applica ...

, a portfolio management and product management tool. *

Wrike Wrike, Inc. is an American project management application service provider based in San Jose, California. Wrike also has offices in Dallas, Tallinn, Nicosia, Dublin, Tokyo, Melbourne and Prague. History Wrike was founded in 2006 by Andrew File ...

, An agile collaborative work management

References

{{Reflist Japanese business terms Lean manufacturing Project management techniques Project management

Applications

Notable tools

See also

References