What is a Kanban Board?

How do you best visualize work, limit work-in-progress tasks, and maximize efficiency? You can start with implementing a kanban board, a tool used in agile project management.

In this week's video, I talk about how this popular tool helps to create a visual overview of tasks and their corresponding statuses. With an intuitive layout and availability in SaaS-based tools such as, Asana, Teamwork, and Jira, it's no surprise it's been highly adopted by agile software development teams.

Saas-Based Tools

Asana: https://asana.com/

Teamwork: https://www.teamwork.com/

Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Trello: https://trello.com/

Transcription

Hi, it's Xavier Chang, Principal of XC Consulting.

Today, I'm back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier and today we're talking about the Kanban board.

The Kanban board is a great tool used in software development, project management, various other business departments also use the Kanban board to stay organized.

Even people use this for their personal lives to keep their projects on track.

The Kanban board, really what the power of it is, is a way to visually give you a sense as to where you stand within your project. Today what I'd like to do is walk you through a template and teach you how you can use this tool for either your business or your personal life.

Let's jump right into it. What you see here is an example project Kanban board, and across the top, you have various statuses from, to do, in progress, done, and approved. These are the basic statuses that you might find in any Kanban board if you're just starting out.

If you need something more specific, you can always make changes. Depending on your industry or your type of role, these statuses might be a little bit different. For example, if you're in software development, instead of a "to do," you might have something called "backlog" or something similar to that. That's just a small example of how these statuses can change.

On your first column over here, the basic instructions are to identify the various tasks that you might have for your project. With that in mind, you fill in a digital sticky note. If we were doing this in person, you can actually use real life sticky notes to make sure that you document what your tasks are for the project.

I've created an example here for filling out my taxes. What are the various tasks that I need to do in order to get this project accomplished? For each task, I've written down what the task is and I put it on a individual sticky note. So you'll have "collecting documents," "running the profit and loss statement," "tracking retirement contributions," "tracking other deductions," and then finally "sending all of this to the accountant."

Everything starts in "to do," as I'm just starting this project. Once I'm "in progress" and I've started the various task or tasks, I can then move them over. This "collecting documents," once I start this, I can move this to "in progress."

If I'm looking at this at any given time, or if I'm sharing this with somebody else, they'll be able to see that Xavier started to "collect documents."

If you've collected all your documents, you would then move this to the "done" section and if appropriate "approved."

Do this for each of these tasks but it doesn't need to be sequential; you can do them concurrently. For example, you can "collect documents," you can "run the profit and loss statement," you can "track retirement contributions." You can do that all at the same time, whenever you look at this, and whenever you share this Kanban board with somebody, you'll be able to visually show them the progress of doing your taxes for the year.

That's how you use a Kanban board and really you can do this with any type of project you have. Like I said, this is a, business project that I'm doing to stay organized for my administration, for my taxes, but you can also do it for any type of production level work. Either if you're a consultant, in the software development space, whatever it may be, you could use this tool.

I hope you thought that was helpful; learning a little bit more about the Kanban board. I hope you do apply this to your business or personal life because I do find that it's a very helpful tool.

You might have heard of tools like Asana, Teamwork, JIRA, Trello is another one. They either have this built-in into the software, or there's the ability to switch views where you're actually able to switch to a Kanban view. That might be very helpful in terms of how you process information.

Thanks a lot. If you thought this was helpful, please give me a like for this video, consider subscribing to my channel. I've got new content that comes out every week and I hope to see you for the next one. Thanks so much.

Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel with Xavier I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content. Thanks again and I hope to see you again next time.