Kanban board


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