Is Kanban a Task board?
No, it isn’t. Certainly, these two concepts should be divided. Let’s figure out what the difference between a task board and a kanban board is. Who will win in the ‘Task board vs Kanban’ battle?
What is a task board?
A task board is a tool that represents work and the path towards its completion. The work at hand can be displayed in just a few columns or distributed on several organizational levels. No matter how easy or complex a task board is it is still an important tool for successful task completion. First of all, it helps to distribute and prioritize items. Additionally, it serves for better team collaboration. As a result, a team is able to be productive and deliver a high-quality product. These factors make a task board an essential part of any workflow where people are working together.
How a task board can help a team?
If a task board is organized correctly it is definitely of service. It helps teams
- Visualize workflow
- Have all information in one place
- Distribute tasks
- Improve productivity
- Meet deadlines
- Set dependencies
Everybody in a team can consider a task board as a centralized resource for all the tasks. Thus, you may review tasks and discuss project changes, overview progress and set goals.
If you wonder who can use a task board, the answer will be simple – everyone. It is safe to say, task boards bring value to any workflow no matter if it is software development, manufacturing or business development.
What is a kanban board?
Now when you know more about task boards we will cover the concept of a kanban board.
Just like a task board, kanban consists of cards and columns. The most frequent structure of a kanban board is To-Doing-Done. It means that you see the queue of tasks, the items already in work and the completed ones. The number of items you may have in columns is limited. The work in progress limit is especially strict. The kanban method correlates with the concepts of constant improvement and optimization.
How a kanban board can help a team?
First of all, the aim of a kanban board is in time delivery. The team members direct their efforts to keep up with deadlines. Also, it serves to limit the in-progress amount of work. Thereby, it ensures that the team commits the right amount of tasks in certain timeframes. Usually, tasks on kanban boards are small enough to avoid busywork. So it is easy to handle tasks.
Task board vs Kanban?
Generally speaking, a task board is a more broad term than kanban. While a kanban board can be considered as a type of task board. Both are methods of task representation, but kanban has more defined rules. We can observe cards and columns on both boards. You just need to decide what columns your workflow needs. Additionally, if you feel that the kanban methodology can bring value, it will be a good decision to try it.
There is a tool that allows building a task board and a kanban board – Kanbanchi. There will be no need to decide what specific approach you need to adopt. In Kanbanchi you may build various types of boards for different projects. What’s more, the data from one board can be viewed from different angles. Thus, you may quickly switch to the Gantt chart to see the tasks in a timeline or click Task view to see the items in a simple list. The list grouping feature serves to group items in columns depending on what kind of data they contain, e.g. priority or assignee.