Kanban board · Project management · Agile
How to use a kanban board, with one week of moves
By T. Krause
A kanban board is more than a to-do list in columns. The columns show where work is, and the limits decide what happens next. Here is how to use one, followed through a made-up team's week, move by move, with the counts for every evening.
To use a kanban board, write each piece of work on its own card and place the cards in columns that match how work moves, such as To do, In progress, Review and Done. Agree a maximum number of cards for the columns where work happens. When you finish a card, move it right and pull the next one. If the next column is full, help clear it before you start anything new.
Those limits are the part that's easy to skip. Without them, the board shows you a queue and does nothing about it. The Kanban Guide from Kanban University says "WIP limits are key to establishing a pull system", where WIP means work in progress, and it describes every board the same way: "Common to all boards is pulling work from left to right through the board".
We make Prompt Board, and our kanban board template opens on the same eleven cards as the week below. A wall and sticky notes work too.
A week on one board
Everything in this section is invented: the team, the project and every move.
Maya writes and designs. Jonas and Priya are developers. They're relaunching a website, and their board has eleven cards. They've agreed two policies and written the limits into the frame titles:
- In progress holds at most 3 cards, one per person.
- Review holds at most 2 cards, and nobody reviews their own work.
Here's Monday morning.
| Column | Cards |
|---|---|
| To do | Write pricing page copy. Pick hero photo. Set up 301 redirects. Cookie banner review. |
| In progress | Build new navigation (Jonas). Migrate blog posts (Priya). |
| Review | Contact form (Priya's). Mobile menu (Jonas's). |
| Done | Sitemap. Design tokens. Domain DNS. |
What moved
| Day | Moves |
|---|---|
| Mon | In progress has a free slot, so Maya pulls Write pricing page copy. |
| Tue | Jonas finishes Build new navigation, but Review is full. He reviews Priya's Contact form, which passes and goes to Done. His navigation card takes the free Review slot, and he pulls Set up 301 redirects. |
| Wed | Priya finishes Migrate blog posts, and Review is full again. She reviews Jonas's Mobile menu into Done, moves her card to Review and pulls Cookie banner review. |
| Thu | Priya's cookie card is waiting for a lawyer's answer, so she reviews Build new navigation into Done. Maya's pricing copy takes the free slot, and she pulls Pick hero photo. |
| Fri | Jonas finishes Set up 301 redirects with Review full. He reviews Migrate blog posts into Done, then moves his card over. Priya rings the lawyer, who needs another week. |
The count each evening
| Day | In progress | Review | Done |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | 3 | 2 | 3 |
| Tue | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Wed | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| Thu | 3 | 2 | 6 |
| Fri | 2 | 2 | 7 |
To do falls by one card a day until it's empty on Thursday, and no evening breaks a limit.
Look at Tuesday. Without a limit, Jonas would have added a third card to Review and started something new. Contact form could have gone on waiting, and nothing on the board would have pushed anyone to look at it. With the limit, finishing his own card meant reviewing someone else's first. The same thing happened to Priya on Wednesday and to Jonas again on Friday.
Friday's clean-up
The team's weekly look at the board takes ten minutes and has three findings.
Review was full every evening. Review is where this team's work queues, and that's a better topic for next week's conversation than anyone's speed. They might keep an hour free for reviews each morning, or teach Maya enough to review front-end changes.
The cookie card isn't moving. It has sat in In progress since Wednesday while it waits on someone outside the team, and it uses up a slot. They split it in two. The lawyer's question moves to a new Waiting column with the lawyer's name on it, which frees the slot. "Change banner after legal answer" goes into To do, ready to pull once the answer arrives.
Four cards reached Done. That's the week's throughput, and next Friday it gives them something to compare with.
Choosing your columns
The template's four columns are a starting point. The Kanban Guide says "Your Kanban board should reflect your specific workflow, which is usually more than columns labeled as To Do, Doing, Done."
To find your columns, follow one recent piece of work and write down each place it waited for someone or changed hands. These are illustrations, so adjust them to your own team.
| Team | Columns |
|---|---|
| Website content | Ideas, Drafting, Editing, Legal check, Published |
| Customer support | New, With us, Waiting for customer, Solved |
| Small bakery orders | Ordered, Baking, Packed, Collected |
Add a column when work regularly waits at that point. A column that cards pass through in minutes can go.
Setting your first limits
The guide says a limit "can be defined per work state(s), per person, per lane, per type of work, for a whole Kanban system, etc." There's no correct first number. Our suggestion is to start with one card per person in the column where they work, the way this team did, or two if your work often waits on other people.
Then watch what happens for two weeks. If people regularly sit idle, raise the limit by one. If the column is never full, the limit isn't changing anyone's behaviour, so lower it by one.
Atlassian's guide to kanban boards describes what a full column should cause: "the team needs to swarm on those cards and move them forward before new cards can move into that stage of the workflow." That's what Jonas did on Tuesday. The rule only works if the team really does stop, so agree in advance what people do when they can't pull a card.
What to read off the board
The Kanban Guide from ProKanban.org, a separate guide with its own authors, names four measures. Here they are, applied to Friday evening.
| Measure | Means | On this board |
|---|---|---|
| WIP | Started but not finished | 4 cards |
| Throughput | Finished per unit of time | 4 cards this week |
| Work item age | Time since a card started | Pricing copy is oldest, at 4 days |
| Cycle time | Start to finish | Not known yet |
The last row is empty for a plain reason. Every card that reached Done this week started before Monday, so the team has no start date for any of them. From next week, writing the start date on a card gives them a real figure.
Work item age is the one to check daily, because you can still act on it. Pricing copy started on Monday and is still in Review, so it's the card to ask about in Monday's standup.
Running the standup from the board
A daily standup on a kanban board can skip the round of "what did you do yesterday". Start at the right-hand side and walk left, asking what it would take to move each card one column on. Finished cards come first, then Review, then In progress. If you run out of time, the cards you missed are the ones furthest from done.
Keep the bigger questions for a retrospective. "Why is Review always full?" won't get answered in fifteen minutes.
Where kanban comes from
Toyota's 75-year history describes the kanban as "a tool that describes which and how many parts are used where and when" and says "The new kanban management system was adopted at all plants in 1963." Those were cards attached to car parts, rather than a board of columns. A Toyota summary of its production system says it modelled the idea on the supermarket, retrieving "only the necessary parts at the right time".
The move to office work came later. Kanban University says its method is based on David J Anderson's 2010 book on the subject and that "The roots of the method are found in Lean Manufacturing." The sticky-note board with columns isn't something Toyota's history describes, and we didn't find a dated source for who drew the first one, so we won't name anyone.
Frequently asked questions
What are the columns on a kanban board?
There's no fixed set. A common starting point is To do, In progress and Done, and our template adds Review. Use the steps your own work goes through.
What is the difference between a kanban board and a scrum board?
Atlassian puts it this way: "Scrum boards reset after each sprint, whereas Kanban boards are ongoing". If your team plans in sprints, you can use both ideas together, and our guide to running sprint planning covers the planning side. The Kanban University guide treats kanban as something you add to your current way of working rather than a rival to it.
What does WIP limit mean?
WIP means work in progress. A WIP limit is the most cards a column, person or team may hold at once. When a column reaches its limit, nobody moves another card into it until a slot opens.
What should you do when a card is blocked?
Mark it so that everyone can see it, and name who it's waiting for. If it will wait for days, agree whether it keeps its slot. The team in this example moved the waiting part to its own column and put the remaining work back in To do.
Can you use a kanban board on your own?
Yes. Set your limit to one or two cards in progress, and treat Review as whatever you need to check before something counts as finished. Without a colleague to review your work, leave a gap of a day if the job allows it.
Set up your own
List the work on cards, and name your columns after following one real job from start to finish. Open the kanban board template, overwrite the website cards with yours, and write a limit in each working column's title. Share the link and run the next standup from the board.