What is kanban? The simple but effective way to manage tasks

Kanban is a visual approach to project management. It uses a board called a kanban board with different columns to represent steps in your workflow. Each task has a separate card on the board, and the card moves across the columns as work progresses.

Kanban is a simple but effective way to keep track of work across teams and boost productivity.

List every task that needs to be completed from beginning to end - or go ahead and put them straight onto your kanban cards. Each card should have one task written on it, though some online tools give you the option to add subtasks or checklists under the main task, too.

A common convention for this is also a simple one: ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’, ‘Review,’ and ‘Done’. You will be placing your cards into each of these sections on the board as they move through the workflow.

Though all of your tasks will start in your ‘To Do’ section (or another name you’ve decided to go with), that doesn’t stop you from prioritising them. Use colours or labels to clearly show which tasks your team should focus on first. This will help your workflow by reducing the number of tasks blocked by other tasks that should have been completed first, and ensuring urgent work is seen to as soon as possible.

It might sound counterintuitive, but reducing how many tasks your team are working on simultaneously helps boost productivity by reducing multitasking and burnout.

Kanban encourages collaboration, with tasks on the board up for grabs by any member of the team. If you’re comfortable, try completing a task outside of your usual work realm, or help another member of your team to complete their task.

Make sure to indicate on the card who has claimed the task or whether it is still up for grabs. This helps everyone know when a task is still in need of a volunteer and grants visibility to the right people for their hard work.

A kanban board will have several columns to represent different steps in your workflow. For instance, a simple board might have the following steps:

You can also include steps such as ‘Backlog,’ ‘Blocked,’ and anything else that makes sense in your team’s typical workflow.

From here, you need to add your tasks to your kanban board. Each task needs its own card and should have a title, description, assignee, and a due date (if it’s applicable). Add them to the relevant column.

A ‘Backlog’ column is a useful place to put tasks that are yet to start but will be coming up soon. This helps you get on with work quicker by already having tasks ready to go.

Now, you can start moving your tasks through the kanban board. If a task is in ‘To Do’ and you begin work on it, put its card in ‘In Progress’. When the bulk of the work is complete and awaiting approval, move the card to ‘Review.’ A ‘Blocked’ column may come in handy if anything comes up that stops your progress for a while. Finally, when the task is complete, move the card to ‘Done’.

Though you can create physical kanban boards by hand using paper and a pen or sticky notes, the easiest way to share visibility of your tasks with your team (especially when working remotely) is to use an app.

Confluence is a powerful collaboration platform that pulls project management, documentation, and note-taking together in one handy place, making it one of the best knowledge management tools around.

More kanban-specific tools are out there, but rather than introduce your team to yet another tool they’d have to switch between and learn to use, you might be happy to find that Confluence has everything you need for a great kanban board, allowing you to keep things simple and consistent.

What better way to start with kanban than an adaptable template featuring tips from the agile expert Jon Kern (one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto)? This template keeps kanban simple and takes away any unnecessary fluff that can clutter more complex tools.

To use the template, you’ll need Mosaic for Confluence: an app that will unlock all sorts of new ways to format and organise your content, including plenty of other templates for almost every use case.