Kanban in a minute

Kanban is a popular Agile framework that uses four principles and six methods to help you constantly improve the efficiency or flow of your work, letting you get more done in less time.

4 principles

1. Start with what you do now.
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change.
3. Respect current process, roles, responsibilities and titles.
4. Leadership at all levels.

6 methods

1. Visualise.
2. Limit work in progress (WIP).
3. Manage flow.
4. Make policies explicit.
5. Implement feedback loops.
6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally.

Make your own Kanban board

A Kanban board helps you visualise your work, which means you can limit WIP, manage flow, display policies and so on.

How to create and use a Kanban board

1. Break your work into the stages that make sense for your team and your processes. A simple version might be: To do | Doing | Review | Done
2. Create a column for each of these stages.
3. Write each piece of work on a post-it and place it in the left hand column.
4. Move the post-it along from left to right as you complete each stage.
5. Watch out for work that clumps or stalls in particular stages. Regularly get together to see if you can get the work flowing better.

Tips and tricks

• Don’t spend too much time figuring out your board. Come up with something and start using it, you will quickly see where improvements can be made.
• Keep your board tidy and nominate someone to keep it looking nice.
• Personalise your board so that it’s clear to see who is working on what, maybe try avatars.
• Adhere to work in progress limits so that you can keep work flowing.
• Do a daily stand up around your board so that it can be updated at the same time.
• Use your board to house other important info such as your definition of done, team charter and retro goals.

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