Kanban, is it just a Board or a Methodology?

When we listen about kanban, so many time we spoke something about a beautiful board that magically could management our tasks and make us extremely productivite. However, kanban is not just a board!

What if I tell you that Kanban is like Scrum, with principles, values, best practices, that should be followed to came to the best result in the end of sprint?

Kanban has four principles:

1. explicit conversations over intuitive abilities;
2. small steps over big changes;
3. quality systems over heroic individuals;
4. principles that guide our understanding over practices in which we must trust.

That could be confused with scrum values and other methodologies.

Kanban too has some principles, who for your part also make a lot of people to confuse with other agile methodologies.

Some of those values is:

1. Visualize the workflow;

2. Limit WIP;

3. Manage Flow;

4. Make Process Policies Explicit;

5. Improve Collaboratively.

Now, talking about the board:

Kanban is a visual way to organize and management your/your team tasks and make it clear for everyone without too much explanation.

As a rule, this board are splited in 3 parts, there are: Do, Doing, Done.

Do: means “things that you should start to do”

Doing: means “things that you are doing at time”

Done: means “things that you finished”

Each Kanban is modified based on team requirement.

For a correct use, kanban need to be collaborative, its utilization and reading need to be extremely clear for everyone.

How its works?

• Kanban is manga like reading, who means: the reading should start by right for left and top down.
• Once time task is moved to next step, its never should return back. If its is happening, something is going wrong…
• WIP (Working In Progress) : Is a maxium limit of tasks that each colunm bear. Its a simple rule, but should be respect! Respect the WIP means focusing on the prioritized tasks and keeping each collaborator with restrict number of task in “doing column”.
• Task should be write clearly, simple, and readable for everyone! Task that say “Login” don’t make any sense, and will block all workflow. As such, write task and show to your colleagues, verify its understanding and so put it at board.

Classic photo: I and a multilanguage kanban behind me.

I suggest that if you like this post see that material:

Undestand WIP (PT-BR): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G3p_AkkEzo&t=1s

It was my first contact with Kanban, and make me understand (PT-BR): https://www.infoq.com/br/minibooks/priming-kanban-jesper-boeg