origin: japanese word for signboard. used to make manufacturing more efficient. think of it as an assembly line for tasks. tasks move from left to right on a kanban board... each move into a column to the right signifies a step change for that task e.g. it goes from WAITING to DOING to COMPLETED. | backlog | waiting | doing | completed | |--|--|--|--| | task 1 | | | | | | task 2 | | | ||| task 3 || |||| task 4 | In the example above, task 3 is being worked on and when it finishes it can move into the completed column and the next task that is waiting (task 2) can be started and so it is moved into the doing column.... | backlog | waiting | doing | completed | |--|--|--|--| | task 1 | | | | | | | task 2 | | |||| task 3 | |||| task 4 | How to setup kanban My advice would be to start with a sheet of paper and work out the columns you need. You can do this on a whiteboard if you need to share it with a team. In one place I worked we had a large whiteboard and marked out the columns (and rows) in tape... then using a dry erase marker we put tasks in "cells" eventually we had a row per person so you could see each team members workload and progress like this... |who| backlog | waiting | doing | completed | |--|--|--|--|--| | Ann | task 5 | |task 1 | | | Bob | task 6 | | task 2 | | | Carol | task 8 ||task 7| task 3 | |Dave |task 12|task 10|task 9 , task 11| task 4 | This implies that tasks 5,6,8,12 are not yet ready to do as they are not in "Waiting" like task 10 is