The word ‘Kanban’ is a Japanese name which stands for ‘Sign Board’ or a ‘Visual Signal’. Today, web development process has changed in terms of delivering a good product and that too in an organized manner with a limited time frame. The concept of Kanban board is one of the approaches adopted by many Tech and Non-Tech companies to easily customize the work.
Kanban was first developed by an industrial engineer ‘Taiichi Ohno’ at Toyota to maintain a high-level production.
Kanban can be used to regulate many areas of an organization. The Kanban board mainly consists of three columns.
- To Do
- In Progress
- Done
These columns are helpful for an individual or a team to organize their work in a better way, which as a result also increases the production rate.
What does the three columns consist off?
To Do
This step of the Kanban board includes the list of items (Work) that needs to be achieved to develop a product. The requirements are always there in bits and pieces (Can be considered in sprints if we talk about the software development process). So, it can be prioritized by the managers/supervisors that what are the things that need to be worked upon first on priority. The priority hierarchy follows from top to bottom, where the items listed at the top must be focused first, followed by the items that are ranked 2nd, 3rd, and so on.
In Progress
After the managers/supervisors prioritizes the work, a person or a team who is responsible for the first priority task will move that item to ‘In Progress’ column and start working on that. This makes everyone in the team or across the organization aware of what is being done currently in the development phase and the next thing that needs to be focused upon.
Done
As soon as the work is finished by a team/individual, the item is then moved to ‘Done’ column with comments. This also brings to clarity that what has been achieved till now and what are the things left in ‘To Do’ list.
Benefits of Using Kanban
A Visual model
As the work is suppressed into a visual model of a ‘To Do’ list, it lets us analyze about the work that needs to be done and the flow that is being followed while creating a project/product. This may also help us to rectify the bottlenecks and blockers, which leads to the increase of collaboration and an effective communication within a team.
Control the ‘In Progress’
One can limit the work that is dragged into ‘In Progress’ from ‘To Do’ column by considering the amount of work that can be handled by the team or an individual at one time. We are quite convinced by the fact that human beings have a tendency to leave many things half done, which can be completely avoided following this approach.
Focus on current progress
Using ‘In Progress’ also helps to optimize the work, which improves proper flow of the ongoing work. Sometimes the leading issues in the current work process help us defend the future problems by analyzing the flow.
Below is the image that describes about how we can use this board in software development:
