What is a Kanban board?

Kanban system originally comes from Japan. It is part of the JIT system (just in time) that was developed in the manufacturing industry to optimize the production workflow. On a physical whiteboard, there were lines that showed the steps in the production process. Paper cards on a board needed to signal when the parts run out. That’s how the term was born, Kan (visual) + Ban (card).

Many years later online Kanban boards gained their popularity and almost replaces physical boards. The Kanban method is simple and can be applied to any process which resulted in it being widely used by many companies in the world.

The form of Kanban boards hasn’t changed much, however. It’s still lists and cards. Lists represent the stages of the workflow and cards represent tasks that will go through these stages to be completed in the end. You may vary the number of lists and their names, you may have one board for all your team or separate boards for separate roles or departments. However, the core stays the same.

A Backlog contains all the tasks that your team needs to do. The cards that you will be doing during a particular period of time will move to the “To Do” list. Then they move to the “Doing” list, and eventually to the “Done” list.