This is one of the benefits my software developers enjoyed about kanban.Įvery approach has its downside.
Reduced waste: Because team members are working efficiently, the process reduces time wasted on activities that do not relate to getting tasks done.Moreover, once applied, it can be revised and molded as you see fit to make it work in your specific scenario. As a result, it can be applied to many types of projects. No formal roles exist, so it can accommodate your existing team structure. There are not a lot of rules in the system so it’s easy to apply. It’s also designed to fit into existing company workflows. You can add and remove work items at any time so long as it’s not already in progress. High flexibility: Kanban is a very flexible framework.Also, the daily stand-ups ensure frequent team check-ins and a forum for surfacing workflow challenges, allowing the team to collaboratively find solutions. Improved communication: Team members can see status across the group on the board easily.Kanban provides an optimal way to generate high throughput and efficiency from a team. Increased throughput: Because team members are not waiting for work to be assigned, there’s no idle time.Why is kanban project management so effective? Here are the pros behind this approach. Kanban, because of its flexibility and efficiency, can be a powerful framework for getting projects done. Teams involved in industries such as marketing, software development, or content creation can benefit from kanban. It’s an ideal approach for projects with lots of incoming tasks that vary in priority and size, such as creating marketing collateral for a product launch. Other lean project management principles exist within kanban as well to manage workflow and continuously evolve the process, such as feedback loops and daily meetings called stand-ups (because everyone stands to keep it brief).
Its principles are simple, allowing you to apply and adapt them to any work scenario. If this situation arises, the team focuses efforts on clearing the work in that segment. Once that limit is reached, no more work can enter that phase. To ensure there’s not more work than the team can handle, each phase on the kanban board should have a limited number of cards allowed in that workflow segment based on your team’s capacity. They grab their own work, finish it, then move on to the next item on the list. Limit WIP: Once work is on the board, let your team have at it. This is how the entire team sees the status of the work being done. Cards that have yet to be worked on go into one segment of the kanban board designated for this, such as a "not started" column, and as each card is addressed, it moves to the next phase until it’s moved completely through the workflow. The kanban board is divided into segments representing the various phases of your project workflow. The cards can be digital such as in project management software, or physical cards like sticky notes placed on a whiteboard. Visualize your work: You collect the work required for a project and document it on cards placed on a kanban board. This is accomplished through the two primary principles of kanban: visualize your work and limit the work in progress (WIP). At the same time, the team is never given more work than it can handle. It’s about maintaining a continuous task flow, with each piece of work arriving at its completion point as quickly as possible by maximizing team efficiency. Let’s unravel the intricacies of both so you can pick the framework that is most applicable to your business needs.Įven though I have a preference for scrum, kanban is a cool concept. I can tell you my software developers enjoyed kanban while I, being a product owner, preferred scrum. I’ve used both in my career, building and launching software products at companies of all sizes. The differences come in the methods used to achieve results. As a result, they share some fundamental similarities. Both are designed to allow for a quick, steady pace of work that can adapt to changing customer needs. Scrum and kanban are two popular agile project management frameworks.