What Is a Kanban Board?

A Kanban board is a physical or digital visualization of tasks that a team needs to complete in a project, displaying their current stage. Kanban boards have various components to help a team understand their high-priority, pressing tasks at a glance. 

While popular in business operations, software development, and sales, Kanban boards offer valuable project management benefits for various industries. Continue reading to explore the components that make up a Kanban board. Additionally, learn about the two types of Kanban boards and the advantages or challenges associated with both types. 

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a project management framework that uses Agile principles to plan, visualize, and organize project tasks. It streamlines communication and creates a transparent teamwork approach. Commonly used for software development, Kanban is also adaptable to a wide range of projects. 

Engineer Taiichi Ohno developed this framework. Named after the Japanese word for “signal,” he adapted it from the production system implemented initially by Toyota. Kanban and Agile are separate systems, but the tools available within Kanban—including Kanban boards and Kanban cards—work with Agile principles and values to help organize projects.  

What is a Kanban board?

A Kanban board is a method of visualizing workflow. It’s advantageous in teams that need to understand what every other team member is working on. Kanban boards can help team members focus their work strategically, boost productivity, and limit work in progress for better efficiency. 

A Kanban board contains various components that help break down Agile project management into daily workflows. It also helps organize team efforts around the most important tasks of the day. 

Components of a Kanban board

A Kanban board is a visualization of all the tasks a team needs to complete—highlighting who will complete them. These boards enhance project management by organizing tasks through columns, color-coding, plus other methods. 

Such elements help differentiate between tasks, teams, and sprints—short, focused periods where teams work towards a specific goal within a set timeframe.  

What does each part of a Kanban board do? Let’s explore the various parts to understand how they work together. 

Visual cards

In Japanese, Kanban translates to a visual (kan) card (ban). It briefly describes visual cards, which are simply squares of information you can easily view. You could also call it a “ticket” or a “sticky note.” 

You assign each task within a project to a visual card. Then, you can move it through the different work stages, assigning it to various members within a team. Kanban cards can be color-coded or otherwise differentiated from each other to tell—at a glance—which tasks relate to one another. 

Columns or swimlanes

Columns on a Kanban board mark stages of progress on a given task. For example, a Kanban board might include columns marked “to-do,” “in progress,” or “complete.” Tasks assigned to cards would start in the “to-do” column and move through each column—sometimes called swimlanes—as the team finishes them. 

Depending on the project, Kanban boards can have as many columns as needed to designate each stage required. With columns, it’s easy to quickly see a bird’s eye view of where each project’s tasks fall in the order of production. 

Work-in-progress limits

Work-in-progress (WIP) limits the number of tasks a team can work on simultaneously, which keeps projects simple and everyone on the same page. It helps maintain workflow organization without overwhelming the team with too many tasks to manage. WIP limits can help reduce workflow bottlenecks and aid teams in delivering quality work at constant intervals. 

Commitment point

A commitment point refers to the moment an idea stops being an idea and begins to transform into an actionable task, one the team is moving forward on. Some Kanban boards include a backlog of ideas and potential tasks the team could work on. When those tasks pass the commitment point, they cease to be theoretical, and work begins.  

Delivery point

A Kanban board's delivery point is when the team passes the deliverable along to the client and the work is finished. Kanban aims to move tasks from the commitment point to the delivery point as quickly as possible. 

Who uses Kanban boards

Kanban boards can be helpful for any projects that use Agile project management methodology. Software development teams commonly use Agile, and Kanban originally came from the Toyota industrial production planning system. The framework can also provide value to sales departments, Lean manufacturing, business operations, and more. 

Types of Kanban boards

Kanban boards come in two main types: physical boards and digital boards:

Physical boards

The project management world has relied on Kanban as a valuable tool since the 1940s. Before digital solutions, all Kanban boards were physical. Sticky notes or cards placed on simple or elaborate boards documented project tasks and team management. A whiteboard, corkboard, or chalkboard might serve as the foundation for the Kanban board. 

Digital boards

With the invention and implementation of digital project management tools, the software now exists to help teams build a dynamic digital Kanban board. These boards are available to team members no matter where they are. Digital Kanban boards allow teams to access workflow and visualize work tasks without being in one central room with a physical board. 

Kanban or Scrum: Advantages and limitations

Kanban and Scrum are project management tools that use the Agile methodology to approach projects, but you don’t have to choose one or the other for your projects. 

Scrum is a work organization method based on Agile methodology. In Scrum, you divide each day's essential tasks into sprints, with work time dedicated to specific tasks for the whole team to focus on. Scrum focuses on learning and continuously improving through feedback and learning loops. Each team member has a clearly defined role, such as product owner, Scrum master, and development team.

A Kanban board can help organize and visualize daily sprints for a project within Scrum. These tools work together or independently, depending on the needs of your project. Scrum helps define how much the team will complete and which activities will go into a sprint, while a Kanban board helps organize those activities. 

Advantages

Kanban and Scrum both have strengths that make them powerful project management tools. Kanban has been a project management method for a long time now and has a proven track record of success. 

Kanban’s strengths include: 

• Quick visualization of workflow 

• Flexible and rearrangeable

•  Instantly highlights bottlenecks 

• Everyone is on the same page 

Created in 1995, Scrum was inspired by rugby. It refers to the moment when the team collaborates to advance the ball. Scrum operates within a philosophy that’s compatible with Agile principles. 

The advantages of using Scrum include: 

• Opportunities for clear communication and feedback

• Established processes and timelines

• Encouraged creativity

• Low implementation cost

• Better quality work 

Limitations

Whether using Kanban and Scrum independently or as an integrated system, you should be aware of their limitations, which include:   

• Needs modern adaptation: Kanban is older than digital tools and requires continual adaptation to keep pace with contemporary processes. 

• Lacks deadlines: Traditional Kanban boards don’t have a place for task deadlines, so your team will need to add ways to keep the focus on time constraints. 

• Sprints can cause pressure: A daily sprint can make the team feel pressured to finish the deadline. Teams need to be careful to manage expectations and work sustainably, which is one of the Agile principles. 

• Works best for smaller teams: Scrum works best for a team of under ten people and can be challenging to scale for larger projects. 

Getting started with Kanban for project management

Within the Agile framework, Kanban and Scrum are two powerful tools for project management, allowing you to lay out and visualize every aspect of your workflow. It gives you a bird’s eye view of the status of a project. If you’re ready to take the next steps and learn more, consider taking a course or earning a certificate on Coursera. 

If you’re ready to jump into a career in project management, consider taking the Google Project Management: Professional Certificate to help you develop skills in strategic thinking, change management, stakeholder management, project planning, task estimation, and more.