A Seasonal Introduction to Kanban 🎄

Written By James Powis

Kanban is a popular system for managing projects.

Work items are represented visually on a Kanban Board allowing team members and individuals to see the state of any piece of work at any time. They ‘physically’ drag the work items across the board, through each stage.

Efficiency and focus is derived from limiting work-in-progress (WIP) and maximising the 'Flow' of work through the board.

Kanban has been around for a long time. It originated in the early 1940s at Toyota to control and manage work and inventory at every stage of production. It's become popular recently due to its use in agile software development but its flexibility means it can be used for both professional and personal productivity.

A 'basic' To Do, Doing, Done workflow can help teams and individuals understand and manage their work more effectively. Here’s an example:

Even more benefit can be gained tailoring your Kanban boards to you or your team's workflow.

The following is a take on a seasonally-themed exercise we've been using to introduce Kanban to teams and individuals and help them build their workflow.

Step 1. Designing your workflow.

It's coming up to the festive season. We have lots of gifts to buy for friends and family and we want to be super-organised this year!

Let's understand what we want to track and build our Kanban board to help us.

First, we're going to need a list - or ‘backlog’ - of gifts that we can add to as we get more ideas or receive those subtle hints (☺️) from friends and family.

We call this column ‘Would Like’ but you can call it whatever works for you. Gift Ideas, for example.

Once we've got the items we need to wrap them. We create a ‘To Wrap’ Column so we can see what's ready to wrap. Once the gifts are wrapped they are ready to give to the recipient (Ready to Give).

We've multiple people to buy for so we add tags or labels to our items so we can see who each gift is for. Our board looks like:

Step 2. Managing your work.

We can now start using the Kanban board to manage our ‘work’.

As the gifts arrive we drag them to the To Wrap column.

Our Kanban Board gives us clear visibility of what we need to do and we can add to our Would Like column as we get more gift ideas.

Continuous Improvement.

We're always looking to improve our workflow and we identify some areas for improvement.

We found that sometimes there would be issues with the post and we didn't receive what we ordered. With so much going on it's easy to lose track and we want to be able to follow-up quickly when things don't arrive.

We add an ‘Ordered’ column so we can track what has been ordered and follow up quickly if it doesn't arrive.

We also add a filter to our board so we can view our items by recipient. Our board now looks like:

Hopefully this gives you an introduction to Kanban (and also get on top of all that gift buying!).

It's a really flexible workflow so try out different ideas. You could perhaps extend it to the whole year for all gifts and occasions and adapt it to other workflows.

In this example I’ve used Notion: Here’s a link to Notion for the Gifts Kanban Template used in this article for you to try out and adapt.

There are a number of other great tools for Kanban:

James Powis
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Don’t Forget Backlog Refinement