As a popular productivity tool, a Kanban board can help your team and project managers visualize the workflow and enable them to segregate a large project into smaller parts. A Kanban board is widely used in IT, healthcare, manufacturing, and other core industry sectors. Let’s understand the concept of the Kanban board online and see how it is useful in task management software.
Kanban Board- Brief History
A Toyota engineer Taichi Ohno has invented the first-ever physical Kanban task board back in the 1940s. The concept was taken from supermarkets as they replenish their stocks before they completely ran out of goods. The term ‘Kanban’ is a Japanese word that means ‘Visual card’. These visual cards were introduced to Toyota assembling lines with specific parts of the vehicle.
When a worker at the plant saw that their colleague drew one of the remaining cards of a specific type, they made a hurry to replenish the stocks of the part as denoted in the card. This visual scheme was highly popular and helped companies accelerate development cycles while reducing the amount of waste material.
Gradually, the form of the Kanban board online was changed as multicolored sticky notes were attached to it. At the beginning of the 21st century, David J. Anderson, a technology consultant, introduced this approach to software development and project management. Today, the Kanban board is considered one of the most important productivity tools.
Basic Principles of a Kanban Board
The Kanban tool is based on the following rules and practices-
- Never stimulate changes
- Avoid resistance
- Encourage team collaboration
- Formulate policies without unambiguity
- Decentralized approach
- More visualization of the workflow
- Install limits
- Regular monitoring
- Open for experiments
- Review progress periodically
Original Source : Kanban Board Online
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