Kanban Boards are one of the most important elements in tracking the progress and dependencies of all of the tasks associated with a specific project. Things become even more significant if you are working in a project management environment. In that case, the Kanban Board becomes the bread and brawn for most of the ongoing projects.
These boards help you to take a look at how the company is structuring its production process and tracking all of its work activities.
But whenever you take a look at some of the other boards apart from yours, you’ll see a mountain of difference between the two. In this article, we will tell you all of those differences with some very important examples we have from the market.
So, whether you’re a newbie at Kanban boarding or just trying to improve your existing process, this article will help you.
Let’s take a look at some important tips that help you when you are Kanban boarding.
3 Important Tips for Using the Following Kanban Board Examples
1. Think Beyond Your Typical Team Lines
The following Kanban boards that we will discuss in this article were not specifically designed to cater to every specific team and type of work. So, if you are part of the dev-ops team and you see a board that is being used by the Marketing department that you like, try it. It might be useful to you in some way.
2. Copy Wisely
You should try all of the Kanban board examples we show you in this article, but most of the boards were designed to meet the needs of specific teams. So, when you start the copy process, do so wisely in a way that the board in question should first and foremost march your own team’s process.
This will enable you to achieve your own goals and objectives more efficiently.
3. Start with the Basics
Whether you are making your first Kanban board or the 1000th, you should always keep in mind that the process you use, should reflect your reality as much as possible.
Let’s take a look at some of the different Kanban board examples that can cater to various teams in the market right now.
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Kanban Board Examples For Different Teams
1. For Development Teams
If your team is a frequent user of Kanban boards, these following boards mimic three very common use cases for software dev ops teams.
Smaller teams can give the spotlight to the parallel processing of all of the activities done by the developers without losing sight of the whole team’s activities, as a whole.
In the Doing column, the horizontal swim lane lets the team members share the “To Do” and “Done” columns as the major development team of the project at hand while they keep all the steps they take in the development process, completely unique to their relative teams.
Source: Planview.com
When you are using Kanban boards for your projects, consider implementing wait queues in your work processes that enable you to have a pull system for teams of all shapes and sizes. These wait queues are specifically important when you are working with a larger team.
The wait queue is shown in the upper board as “ready”. The items in this column are the ones that are ready to be taken to the next step.
Source: Planview.com
If you want to improve the workflow through your system, consider implementing work-in-process limits or WIP. When you master the skill of limiting your WIP, you will be better able to keep the focus of your team on the shared goals of the company and improve collaboration among the troops.
2. For IT Operations Teams
If you have been working in the field of IT operations then you would know that the teams associated with that department often result in extremely conflicting priority issues.
For this reason, there must be Kanban boards for the operations team. By using Kanban boards for the operations team, the teams can communicate all of the priority conflicts to everyone involved and collaborate to get the work activities flowing again and avoid any future bottlenecks.
Horizontal swimlanes visualized on the board show the different types of demands that help in bringing the spotlight to whatever’s being worked on at the moment. Kanban boards for operations teams also uncover any hidden bottlenecks that must’ve slowed down the work processes later on, if they had been left unattended.
There is no restriction when it comes to using a Kanban board to track any changing work priorities, no matter whichever type of team is using it. In the example shown above, the column labeled “On Hold” is kept beneath the “In Work” column to specify when a specific task has hit a reef or cannot continue.
3. For a Development Team Practicing Scrum
You don’t need to have a specific master’s degree in Kanban to use a Kanban board. Many of the teams in the organizational paradigm nowadays, use the Kanban boards to display their Scrumban, hybrid, scrum or waterfall processes.
Using this board, the scrum teams can take a look at and track all of the work activities that have the utmost importance for the current sprint taking place. These items can be viewed using the “Development In Process” section.
The relevant team pulls in different stories from the section named “Current Sprint Backlog” in addition to seeing the sprint status and managing it from the horizontal feature lane.
Conclusion
Project Management is a tough skill to master and whatever help we can get from the tools of this paradigm, we should get. These examples are some of the very best in the market but it’s always easier to make or improve your own Kanban board using these templates.
Why? Because these boards have been developed from the ground up based on your project’s specifications and it would always take less time to improve the already existing boards rather than importing stuff from others.
