Kanban Project Management: Examples & Best Practices

Kanban is a visual project management methodology that helps businesses optimize workflows and boost efficiency.

In this article, we’ll explore a short history of Kanban project management, its core principles and practices, how it differs from other methodologies, and how to best implement it into your workflows.

Key Takeaways

Kanban is a project management methodology that’s based on the principles of the Agile manifesto and Lean thinking.

It helps project teams visualize and streamline workflows. Building on principles of efficiency and continuous improvement, it establishes its own set of practices to reinforce and enhance these Agile and Lean project management ideas.

Kaban’s main practices include boards and cards to represent tasks and their progress through various stages, often “To Do” to “In Progress” and “Done”.

Kanban was developed by Taiichi Ohno to streamline manufacturing processes and improve efficiency in the late 1940s at Toyota.

Inspired by supermarket inventory management, Ohno aimed to align production with actual consumption, minimizing waste and overproduction.

Source: Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production

If we look at the origin of the word, the term “Kanban” translates to “visual card” in Japanese.

This term refers to one of the core practices of Kanban—it uses a set of different visual cards (it can be sticky notes or work items in a software) to depict a project workflow.

Here are the six core principles of Kanban:

Kanban can also be expanded with four additional principles:

Kanban principles guide how teams should think about work management, such as continuous improvement and collaboration, while practices focus on the actual actions taken. These practical elements include:

At the heart of the Kanban methodology lies the Kanban board, a visual tool that enables teams to effectively organize and manage work.

One important thing to understand is the difference between a task board (which is used for the Scrum framework) and a Kanban board:

Kanban boards consist of a couple of key elements. These include columns, which represent different stages of work and are customizable.

Swimlanes are horizontal lanes that categorize work items, such as separating different projects, teams, or priority levels.

Each column has a number of cards within them, based on set WIP limits. Cards can be tasks, user stories, or other types of items.

We’ll discuss them in more detail in the following sections.

Each Kanban board has a number of work items or cards. Each represents a distinct work item, which can be a task or user story.

These customizable cards contain essential details like descriptions, assignees, due dates, and durations.

There are a couple of basic tips for how to organize information on your cards:

Work in Progress (WIP) refers to the number of items actively being worked on at any given time within a board.

One of Kanban’s core principles is to limit WIP per column, ensuring that teams do not take on more tasks than they can handle efficiently.

There is no strict rule for determining the ideal WIP limit; instead, teams adopt an evolutionary approach, adjusting it over time based on experience and data.

The benefits of using WIP limits include better focus, more frequent feedback loops, and more balanced workloads for project teams.

A daily standup is a short, structured meeting where team members discuss the current status of their tasks, any obstacles they face, and their plans for the day.

While standups are more commonly associated with Scrum, they can be used in various methodologies for ensuring continuous improvement.

During the standup, teams review the board, identify any blockers, and make real-time decisions to optimize efficiency.

Standups usually last around 15 minutes—anything longer than this, and your standup is likely at danger to become unfocused and difficult to follow for all team members.

Now that you know the basics of the Kanban methodology, what’s next?

As we stated already, getting started is not as difficult as some other methodologies or frameworks. You can do it at any time.

You also don’t need sophisticated tools at first—a physical boards with sticky notes can suffice as a first attempt.

At some point, of course, you’ll need to transfer your work items into project management software for easier management.

We’ll discuss best practices, day-to-day considerations, and Kanban software in the next sections.

Here are six essential tips for project managers—some of these things may seem obvious, but it’s worth reiterating them:

1. Plan in Small Steps, Not Big Overhauls

Instead of creating long, detailed plans, focus on short-term priorities and adjust as needed. Kanban works best with rolling-wave planning—define your next few tasks clearly, but stay flexible for changes.

2. Prioritize Learning Over Process Perfection

Don’t get caught up in rigid processes or extensive documentation. Instead, focus on learning how work flows, identifying bottlenecks, and improving team collaboration over time.

3. Deliver Value Continuously

Avoid working in long phases that delay results. Break work into small, valuable increments that can be delivered and improved upon frequently. This keeps progress visible and meaningful.

4. Build a Self-Sufficient Team

Reduce unnecessary handovers by encouraging cross-functional teamwork. The fewer dependencies a team has, the faster and more efficiently work gets done.

5. Empower the Team, Don’t Micromanage

Kanban thrives in a culture where teams own their processes and improvements. Instead of controlling every detail, focus on creating an environment where the team feels supported and motivated to optimize their workflow.

Some daily questions you should ask when managing your workflows include:

As your team becomes more comfortable, gradually introduce improvements like refining workflow stages or adjusting WIP limits to optimize efficiency.

Regularly review and adapt your board based on team feedback to ensure it remains a valuable tool for visualizing and managing work effectively.

Managing your project boards is much easier with software.

These software solutions should have customizable boards with drag-and-drop functionality, task management features, and provide a workspace for easy collaboration between all stakeholders.

With Productive’s Project Management features, you can:

1. Rename each column to represent the stages of work that fit your specific project

This can be something generic, such as “To Be Done”, “In Progress”, “Finished”; or, for software development projects, you can have columns named “Specification”, “Design”, “Development”, “QA”, “Release”.

2. Customize information displayed on cards

You can display various types of information on your task cards with custom fields, such as start date, due date, priorities, task ID, time logged on the task, and much more.

You can also change how cards are grouped. For example, set grouping to assignee to see all task cards assigned to a specific task member. Or, group them by priority to see a list of all your critical or blocked tasks.
You can also define custom priority sets.

3. Manage tasks and collaborate with team members

You can click on each task card to access additional information. Each task functions like a separate workspace for commenting, creating to-dos, linking tasks to others with dependencies, and more.

This helps project teams get quickly up to speed with all recent activities across each card on their board. Clients can also be invited to workspacwes and comment on tasks for asynchronous feedback loops.

4. Make workflows more efficient with Automations and AI

Productive can streamline the process of managing your project boards with custom automations. For example, you can set up an automation that moves a task from “To Do” to “In Progress” if time was tracked on it.

Or, if a task has no assignees, you can set up an automation that immediately assigns a project manager to it.

With AI filters, you can filter your tasks by entering a simple query.

Productive also offers a variety of different project views, so it can be more than just a Kanban tool (not to mention its resource and financial management features).

You can use a Gantt chart view for visualizing milestones and task dependencies, and a Workload view which shows employee time off and capacity.

According to the 2022 State of Kanban report, the top five benefits of implementing Kanban include:

Other include improved customer satisfaction, quality, and risk management, and decreased project cost.

Kanban is most often used in software development and IT departments (over 30% of submissions), but it can also be used product development (around 10%), general operations (around 5%), marketing and sales (around 5%).

Some of Kanban’s benefits can also be a challenge for certain teams. This includes:

Kanban is easier to implement than more structured frameworks, such as Scrum with its ceremonies and artifacts.

However, this can also be its biggest challenge. Teams can often go wrong by being too focused on the idea of flow in Kanban, and eliminate all types of meetings and ceremonies from the process.

However, ensuring that there are regular check helps maintain alignment, address blockers, and foster continuous improvement without losing the flexibility that makes it effective.

Implementing the parts of Scrum ceremonies that fit your project or production process can provide your process with the structure you need.

Another thing that Kanban doesn’t take from Scrum or XP Programming is timeboxing.

Timeboxing is a technique used in agile software development teams. It organizes work into iterations of a set length (often two weeks), also known as sprints.

Kanban doesn’t include sprints as part of its core practices, but it can be useful to take this tool from Agile frameworks.

Sprints help project managers prioritize the most important tasks and adjust features to focus on their most value-adding parts. Using due dates on task cards is one way to implement this part of agile practices.

Kanban can easily be implemented into current workflows, without the need for a serious rehaul of processes.

In comparison, Six Sigma project management requires the training of specialized staff, as well as adopting methodologies with strict, data-driven steps.

However, sometimes you need a drastic change, and Kanban shouldn’t be your excuse to be complacent with your current processes (if they aren’t working as well as they could).

Still, it can be a great starting point for gradually introducing improvements and new principles.

To effectively track performance and identify areas for improvement, you’ll want to monitor some key metrics, such as:

Cycle time measures how long a task takes within a specific stage, while lead time tracks the entire process from request to completion.

Both metrics can be very useful. If you think that you’re experiencing roadblocks in a specific project stage, such as development or testing, cycle time can provide you with reliable data to determine this.

Lead time can be even more valuable, as it highlights overall efficiency. By measuring lead time, you can see whether you have made improvements in your time-to-deliver and predictability.

Tracking these metrics helps identify delays, improve workflow, and make data-driven decisions for optimizing team performance.

Throughput measures the rate at which your team completes a specific volume of work item, within a given time frame.

By calculating the total number of tasks finished divided by the time period, you gain valuable insights into your team’s productivity and workflow efficiency.

A high throughput signifies that a team is working very efficiently, while a low one may indicate bottlenecks or inefficiencies that demand attention.

By comparing throughput during your project management process, you can assess whether your measures are actually improving delivery frequency.

Blocked items and defects slow workflow efficiency. Tracking blockers helps identify how they impact lead time and whether your team is improving at resolving them.

Blockers often stem from dependencies or waiting for input, so measuring trends provides specific data for process improvements.
To capture these metrics, count the number of blocked items or defects on your board.

Visualizing trends with charts helps teams analyze patterns, determine if issues are increasing, and assess whether past improvements had an impact. By addressing blockers quickly, teams can enhance workflow and overall efficiency.

Here’s a brief comparison of Kanban to other project management methodologies and frameworks:

To summarize, the Kanban framework is a powerful tool for optimizing your project management processes.

By embracing visual organization, limiting work-in-progress items, and fostering collaboration, teams of various shapes and sizes can enhance their overall efficiency.

If you’re looking for a method for continuous improvement and low-stakes implementation, Kanban can be a great start.

And if you need a Kanban system, book a demo with Productive to learn more about optimizing your project management.