How to use kanban boards

Like most things in our lives, when work is out of sight, it’s probably out of mind too. That’s why companies use visual tools to organize their workflows and coordinate their teams and departments.

Of these tools, the most enduring is probably kanban. The earliest version originated in Toyota in the 1950s as a system of informational cards attached to manufacturing parts. It has since evolved into the kanban board, which a wide variety of industries now use.

Today, many companies opt for digital solutions that maximize kanban’s benefits while making it mobile and accessible. With these tools, it’s even easier to use kanban boards to increase efficiency and productivity.

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Kanban board features

Digital kanban boards mirror their analog counterparts, starting, of course, with the board itself. A kanban board organizes projects in a way that anyone can understand at a glance, encouraging employees to proactively take on responsibilities.

These are some of the distinguishing features of kanban boards.

Columns

Columns represent each stage of a workflow or value stream map. The basic stages found on traditional kanban boards are “to do,” “doing,” and “done.” However, you can add as many columns as needed to match your processes, such as “awaiting manager review,” “published,” or “deployed.”

Cards

Each individual kanban card represents a task or item and moves horizontally through the stages on the board. Once you get the basics of how to use kanban boards, you and your team can get creative with the different ways to use cards.

For example, Toyota still attaches kanban cards to automotive parts to share detailed information about them. Software developers, on the other hand, may use cards to represent new product features and write details about the feature on the card. The advantage of a digital kanban board is that team members can include as much information as they like on the cards.

With both physical and digital boards, workers can assign specific colors to cards to make boards visually engaging — as well as making them even more practical and easier to read.

Swimlanes

When you watch a swim meet, you look at individual lanes to see each swimmer’s progress. On a kanban board, swimlanes are the horizontal lanes for specific tasks, work items, teams, or related activities.

You can further organize swimlanes for different projects. For example, a social media team might have a specialized swimlane for a long-term project and routine swimlanes for everyday work and planning. Another company may have color-coded groups of swimlanes to easily tell apart teams of developers, marketers, and sales managers.

Work-in-progress limits

There are only so many tasks you can juggle. Kanban reflects this truth with work-in-progress (WIP) limits. These limits simply dictate how many tasks are allowed to be in each stage at any given time.

Implementing WIP limits ensures your team isn’t overloaded — and means they can dedicate their time and resources to a few projects at a time, resulting in higher-quality work.

How to use a kanban board in Jotform Boards

Jotform Boards helps streamline workflows and organize tasks more efficiently. Users can integrate form responses directly into the board, automatically converting submissions into actionable tasks. This allows the entire process, from data collection to task execution, to be managed within Jotform. With the Kanban board view, users can visually track tasks, prioritize them, add descriptions, and enrich tasks with attached files.

Jotform Boards offers collaboration tools to enhance teamwork. Users can share their boards with team members, assign tasks, and strengthen internal communication through comments. Additionally, the activity log ensures that all task modifications are trackable. Tasks can be moved between different categories using a simple drag-and-drop method, making workflow progress easy to monitor. When opening task details, related form responses can be viewed directly, and users can update priority status, due dates, and assigned team members.

With flexible customization options, Jotform Boards can be tailored to fit specific business workflows. Users can create boards from scratch, use existing templates, or generate boards directly linked to forms. By mapping form fields to task properties, relevant information can be displayed directly on task cards. Additionally, users can import past form submissions to add existing applications as tasks to the board. Jotform Boards empowers teams to work in a more organized, efficient, and collaborative manner, streamlining workflows with ease.

Success with kanban

Learning how to use kanban boards can help you foster unity in your company. It’s a time-tested way to keep everyone on the same page and encourage your team members to stay on task. Kanban fuels the processes that make your company work, ensuring that you focus on the finish line while cutting costs and saving time.
Best of all, kanban boards can be a foundation for a healthy and balanced company culture, which is vital not just for your current employees, but for future ones as well.

Photo by olia danilevich