In part 2 of ‘Kanban Boards – A Beginner’s tutorial’, I will go over adding status columns ( control ) for more clarity, flow control metrics ( bottle neck detection ), and Task Swarming ( resource management ). In Kanban Boards – Part 1 – Introduction, I go over how Kanban Boards provide a simple, low tech, cheap way of keeping everyone in the area abreast of what is going on with a particular project, giving the order and status of identified tasks to be done. Anyone who has studied Scrum and other Agile methodologies, well start seeing there is definitely some simulates to a basic Kanban Board, and a Sprint Board, and yes, you can successfully integrate a full fledged Kanban Board in to a hardcore Sprint based environment, to see more on that, visit my article on Kanban Board – Part 3 – Makes your Sprints Sparkle!
Status Columns, might be referred to as checkpoints, Q/A gates, steps, substeps; the point being, it allows for more detail, more control over who is doing what, when, and what is next for the task, again, at a quick glance. Still stupidly easy to keep up to date, requires a mere second or two to move a post it note or a scribble with a dry erase ( don’t recommend it if you seen my handwriting). Using an example in a software industry, you could easily add a column to the right of ‘To Do’, and called ‘Ready’, or in the manufacturing world, this might be called ‘Pulled’. Either way, both mean the something, a task has been approved by seeing to me matured enough, or refined enough to start work on. This might sound a bit redundant, but the first column should be a good, worked out, known list of what most likely needs to be done, and we should be preparing for these tasks. The ‘Ready’ or ‘Pulled’ should be the column designated by the Product Owner or in some cases a Project Manager, and the task has been vetted and put in the queue for ‘we need to do this task next’, so that there is no misunderstanding of what task next to work on. More explanation of what task maturity and ‘ready’ means here Ready, your task really really ready?.
‘In Progress’ and before ‘Done!’ called ‘Testing’. Following ‘Testing’ could be ‘Deployed’ if in a sprint based environment.