What Is a Kanban Board?
The Kanban board is a workflow tool that originated in Japan. Its name is the Japanese original of Kanban (看板) to “signboard”. Firstly, it appeared in the 1940s. Taiichi Ohno brought these boards to the Toyota factory as a way to make their processes more efficient and productive.
The Kanban method works neatly with a Lean management approach. Moreover, it gives benefits such as increased productivity and low amounts of waste during manufacturing processes. Above all, it has also been used successfully in other industries, such as software development.
How Does a Kanban Board Work?
These boards provide simple visual representations of the workflow and are very easy to understand. They often include just three columns. To clarify, they show the categories: “to do”, “doing” and “done”, or some variation of these names.
The process adapts to different teams and industries by adding or changing columns to fit their exact needs. The workflow can then be tracked by managers and anyone else in the team. No matter how big or small the team is and what they do, this gives an at-a-glance summary of how the work is flowing.
Which Kanban Board Tool Is Most Powerful?
The days of relying on sticky notes on whiteboards are long gone for most companies, who have now moved on to using an online Kanban board that lets them manage their workflow more efficiently and introduce this methodology to their remote teams.
The Kanbanchi software ties in perfectly with Google Workspace to provide a comprehensive project management tool that you enter using your Google password. By putting a Kanban board, Gantt chart and time tracker in one place, this application lets you manage all of your tasks and projects together.
There is no need to install any software, as the tool sits in your device’s browser. It integrates with Workspace. You can use the board with Google Drive, Calendar, email and the other Google tools that you use on a daily basis.