What is Kanban?

Kanban is an agile methodology and a system to achieve higher levels of productivity by visualizing work to be done and limiting the work in progress. Kanban is based on the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, the idea that small continual changes result in a substantial improvement over time. Kanban’s work-in-progress principle ensures teams don’t get overburdened and focus is retained on the quality of the work.
Instead of working in fixed and planned iterations like in Scrum, Kanban teams work on priority tasks whenever they come in. The goal of Kanban is to have a constant stream of work without any bottlenecks. Kanban Teams don’t work with time-boxes, the metric they use to monitor their rate of progress is the total time a work item takes to go from “To do” to “Done.” This flow-based method works primarily to prevent capacity overload and to ensure quality. Teams add a limit to the number of tasks that can be worked upon simultaneously (known as WIP limit), so the team doesn’t multitask and slow down productivity.

Kanban Board and Kanban Card

A Kanban board visualizes all the work within the project it consists of three columns, “To do,” “Doing,” and “Done” which represents a status of the task, each task is visualized as a sticky note or card. A Kanban card contains all the essential details of a work item like the title, description, and assignee. Every time a team member finishes a task, the card is moved to the relevant column.