A kanban board is an agile project management tool that empowers project managers to maximize workflow efficiency, limit the amount of work in progress, and visualize individual tasks. These boards are divided into columns, each representing a stage in the workflow. Within those columns are cards that represent individual tasks. These cards are moved from column to column as each task is completed, demonstrating a natural progression through project development processes. Kanban boards can be physical or digital.
The kanban board is the cornerstone of the kanban methodology, a project management framework that divides repeatable processes into distinct stages or steps. When a project manager or team member examines a kanban board, they can better understand the status of each task or assignment within a workflow.
Kanban board elements.
While every kanban board differs depending on a team’s objectives, most share a few essential components to help keep things running smoothly.
- Cards. Each kanban card represents a specific work item or task that needs to be completed.
- Columns. Most kanban boards have three columns: To Do, Doing, and Done.
- Work-in-progress (WIP) limits. Work in progress reveals how many tasks the team is actively working on. The WIP limit is the maximum number of tasks that should be in progress at any given time.
- Commitment points. The commitment point is when a team begins working on a project.
- Delivery points. The delivery point represents the end of a workflow. Generally, teams reach this point when the service or product is delivered to the customer.
- Swimlanes. Swimlanes are horizontal lines on a Kanban board that separate different categories of work, such as sales and marketing.
Once you’ve incorporated these elements into your kanban board, you can begin to customize it based on the demands of your project. For instance, you can set WIP limits based on the size of your team and how many resources you have available.
In this guide:
Kanban board examples.
Kanban boards are a favorite tool for many software development teams. They make it easy to visualize work, stay organized, and keep projects moving forward.
Kanban board example for IT operations teams.
Regarding project management, IT teams often face a continuous onslaught of inbound demands and shifting priorities. This can make it difficult for management to see what resources are allocated to specific projects or how a task moves forward within a given time frame.
Here, IT operations managers can customize a few Kanban factors. In addition to ensuring that each column or status reflects their team’s workflow, they can also use a feature called swimlanes. Swimlanes are horizontal rows on a Kanban board that separate different work categories. For example, an IT operations team may have an “In Progress” column with several swimlanes for various types of work, such as networking tasks, security tasks, and software upgrade tasks. This can help managers ensure adequate resource allocation while monitoring WIP limits.
For larger organizations, swimlanes can also represent different teams or groups of people dedicated to different deliverables or skillsets. This can further help team leaders and managers ensure that workloads are allocated evenly and prevent the department from committing to more deliverables than they can provide in a set timeframe.
Kanban board example for software development teams.
Software development teams often benefit from implementing Agile frameworks. Teams using other methodologies can also gain an advantage by visualizing their workflow in a Kanban board. Development processes typically require more than the four standard statuses, and project managers should start by ensuring their board’s columns reflect the many steps their team’s projects progress through. This often includes stages like a backlog, grooming, development, testing, validation, review, regression, implementation, and delivery.
Swimlanes can also represent different priorities for a development team. Some Scrum teams, for example, estimate the effort different tasks will take using points or t-shirt sizing. Tasks can then be separated into swimlanes based on the level of effort. Another use for swimlanes is to divide tasks into priority levels to ensure that urgent items have the right resources allocated and are prioritized ahead of less timely tasks.
Using Kanban boards can also help managers, product owners, or Scrum masters ensure that no one developer is assigned more than they can handle in a given sprint or iteration cycle. Again, WIP limits become essential to ensuring that everything assigned in a sprint can be completed as promised, keeping deliverability deadlines in mind.
Kanban board example for design and creative teams.
Creative teams often have several different campaigns and projects running at once, planning ahead for anything from product launches to event promotions. Resource management can be a struggle if project managers don’t understand how involved assigned projects are at a given point in time, when items worked on today may be needed six months out.
Creative workflows also tend to be more protracted regarding brainstorming and development. Instead of having a single “In progress” stage, project managers may prefer to create an “In progress” header and group multiple columns together to represent progress stages such as “Ideation” and “Concept refinement” with multiple reviews built in for team consideration and stakeholder approval. All of this may happen before a true “In development” status that reflects the actual work being done for copywriting, graphic design, editing, final delivery, and implementation.
For example, Kanban boards for creative teams should encourage efficiency by using a single column for reviews instead of seven different review columns, while also reflecting real-world workflows and realistic steps. Swimlanes are a great way to separate sandbox, experimental, or nice-to-have items from essential projects. They can also break out campaign deliverables with different task cards to determine which tasks ladder up to which deliverable.
Kanban board example for engineering and product development
With its roots in manufacturing, it’s no surprise that Kanban works expertly for physical production environments. Product development often involves several teams, making communication of deliverables and timeframes essential. A Kanban board can break down a complex process into a simple status report that’s easy to read.
Project managers commonly align each column on their Kanban board with a different stage in the production lifecycle. Often, this includes several pre-production statuses, sometimes called a drop lane or an unassigned column, to show inbound requests and monitor issues. Project managers can also group columns in broader categories that make the board easier to read, such as creating a header called “Task queue” and placing “Backlog” and “To-do” columns underneath it.
Kanban boards are also widely used to provide management and stakeholders with project or product progress updates. Managers can choose to organize their boards to group tasks more broadly and progressively become more detailed as they move down the board through various swimlanes. For example, the top swimlane may show a high-level timeline for all projects in progress, with a swimlane below it for cards allocated to a particular project.
Kanban board example for customer support teams.
For smaller customer support teams that don’t use a ticketing system for support inquiries, a Kanban board might be the right solution for tracking task statuses. Statuses can be grouped under headings that give a clear picture of how many issues are in for review versus out for customer reply while tracking individual statuses such as “Requested,” “Working,” and “Escalated.”
Items may move back and forth between column statuses depending on the actions taken by support personnel and customers. A column for “Waiting on customer” can also reflect items that have been addressed but aren’t quite ready to be closed out. Having every interaction noted on the card also helps, as items are picked up by various team members or reassigned depending on the level of support needed.
Swimlanes can further segment the cards in your Kanban board by grouping them based on service level agreement (SLA) statuses, time to complete, or criticality. They can also be used to reflect support tiers and issue escalation if other internal teams, such as development or sales, are needed to resolve an issue.
Kanban board example for marketing.
Marketing departments often consider campaigns and need complex organizational workflows to keep their projects on track. Kanban boards provide visuals not only for developing campaign details but also include statuses that reflect when an asset is ready to publish, when it’s live (and where), and when it’s taken down.
Marketing managers can use the Kanban board's organizational properties by grouping columns depending on pre- and post-launch tasks. For example, an “In design” status header might encompass “Initial mock-ups,” “Stakeholder review,” and “Revisions.” Swimlanes can be used in several ways, from grouping similar items in a single campaign or grouping similar types of tasks, such as SEO, design, and copywriting, to view resource allocation by type. Teams can also use active campaign statuses once projects are completed to understand what’s live.
Another way to structure a marketing Kanban board is to reflect an organization's overall marketing funnel and customer journey. The most complex boards can represent different header groupings for stages reflecting top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel activities, with swimlanes that further segment programs based on activity or campaign type.
Kanban board example for sales.
Speaking of the customer journey, sales teams can also use Kanban boards. While sales leaders may use more complex systems to track commissions or financial goals, they need to understand how their pipeline looks from the top down clearly. This can help them better picture how their team performs against sales targets for the customer journey and deal progression. Managers can also use this method to visualize individual sales representative performance and spotlight areas for coaching opportunities.
Kanban boards can use sales funnel stages to organize opportunities and tasks:
- Awareness. Prospects who know of the brand and have the attention of a sales representative but are not ready to make a purchase decision yet.
- Interest. Prospects who’ve demonstrated curiosity regarding specific products or services could be nurtured to sales readiness by providing more information or follow-ups.
- Decision. Prospects who are primed to make a purchase selection and have narrowed down their options to the point of considering pricing.
- Action. Prospects who finally convert to customers by making a purchase, turning opportunities into closed-won deals.
Within these broader sales funnel stages, smaller teams may find it helpful to use statuses that reflect the sales team's in-and-out actions, such as calls, emails, and collateral sent to engage prospects further. Swimlanes are also a great option to call attention to slower or stalled-out deals that might need further attention or to be removed from the pipeline moving forward.
Why are Kanban boards important?
While each team may uncover unique advantages through using kanban boards, several core benefits apply universally across projects and industries using kanban project management:
- Increased team engagement. Team members will experience better overall engagement when interacting with a kanban board and moving tasks off their to-do lists as they complete them.
- Improved project visibility. Kanban boards offer real-time insights into task status, allowing project managers and team members to see what has been completed, is underway, and remains outstanding.
- Reduced risk of missed tasks. Essential tasks can easily get lost when everyone scrambles to complete their assigned work. Kanban boards help prevent this by providing a visual to-do list that project managers can reference to ensure that all essential tasks get completed.
- Less overlap. Swimlanes enable teams to categorically separate work streams, ensuring clarity around responsibilities and minimizing confusion or redundancy between team members.
- Enhanced collaboration. Kanban boards, specifically WIP limits, prevent team members from taking on too many tasks simultaneously. This, in turn, promotes collaboration and ensures that a team has adequate resources to complete important work efficiently.
These are just some of the many perks associated with using kanban boards. There are many other advantages you’ll discover once your teams start using this simple yet effective project management tool.
Digital vs physical kanban boards.
Kanban boards come in different forms, and the right one depends on your team’s setup and preferences. Whether your team works in the same room or across time zones, there’s a kanban style that fits all.
1. Physical kanban boards.
These are traditional, hands-on boards like whiteboards, chalkboards, or bulletin boards. Teams use sticky notes or index cards for tasks and draw columns and swimlanes directly on the surface.
Most teams enjoy using physical boards because they’re obvious and easy to interact with. Seeing the full board in person can create a stronger sense of progress and collaboration than a digital alternative viewed on a smartphone or computer.
2. Digital kanban boards.
Digital kanban boards are created and managed on work management platforms and tools. Within the interface, authorized users can create cards, move tasks, and more.
The primary benefit of digital kanban boards is that they accommodate the needs of remote or hybrid teams. There’s also no mess involved with digital boards. When project managers are ready to set up a new board, they can archive the current one and build another.
Start using kanban boards with Workfront.
Incorporating kanban boards into your workflow is now easier than ever, thanks to Workfront.
Real-time reporting.
Kanban tools keep your team communication in one place and everyone on track. The Workfront Kanban view allows team members to show the percentage of a task’s completion and give written updates in the Updates tab. Individual contributors can tag stakeholders in a task or link to relevant Dropbox folders.
Goal alignment.
By clearly communicating their vision, company leaders can ensure that only the Kanban cards that align with the core strategy are added to the Kanban backlog. Project managers can also prioritize Kanban cards in order of importance. The highest priority cards are pulled onto the board next, meaning teams are only working on the most mission-critical tasks.
Work automation.
Kanban boards in Workfront streamline the intake process by automating workflows. Automated actions can be triggered when a card is created in a column, moved into or out of a column, or stays in a column for a specific period.
Scenario planning.
Scenario planning in Kanban software can help gain buy-in from the executive level. For example, a product marketer could compare multiple campaigns with predicted outcomes and the necessary resources for success.
To learn more about Workfront watch the overview video.
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