Kanban

Kanban is a method for visualizing and managing work as it moves through a process or workflow — originally developed for manufacturing, now widely adapted for software development, project management, and other fields. "Kanban" is Japanese for "visual signal" or "card": the original manufacturing system used physical cards to signal when more materials were needed at a given production step.

The board

A typical Kanban board has columns representing workflow stages — "To Do," "In Progress," "Done" being the simplest version, often expanded with more granular stages (e.g. "In Review," "Blocked"). Each item of work, represented by a card (physical sticky note, or a digital equivalent), moves from column to column as it progresses — giving a clear, real-time visual of what's actually happening, and making bottlenecks and overloaded stages immediately visible rather than hidden in a status report.

Core principles

• Limit work in progress (WIP) — cap how many items can sit in a given column at once. This is Kanban's most distinctive discipline: it prevents team members from being overloaded with too much simultaneous work, and — counterintuitively — tends to make work complete faster overall, since less context-switching and clearer focus beat spreading effort thin across many in-flight items.
• Continuous improvement — regular review and retrospectives to refine the process and eliminate waste, similar in spirit to Kaizen's continuous-improvement philosophy.

Kanban vs. Scrum

Unlike Scrum's fixed-length sprints with a committed sprint backlog, Kanban has no fixed iteration — work flows continuously, pulled into the next stage as capacity allows (governed by WIP limits) rather than planned in discrete, timeboxed batches. This makes Kanban better suited to work with unpredictable arrival patterns or highly variable task sizes (support/operations work, for instance), where committing to a fixed two-week sprint backlog doesn't fit reality as well as a continuous-flow model does.

Often used alongside other methodologies

Kanban is commonly combined with Agile and Lean practices, and adapted to fit different teams — some teams run "Scrumban," blending Scrum's planning cadence with Kanban's continuous-flow board and WIP limits.

Common pitfalls

• No WIP limits, or limits set too loosely to matter — without a real constraint on work in progress, a Kanban board just becomes a visual to-do list, losing the flow-improvement discipline WIP limits are meant to enforce.
• Too many columns, obscuring rather than clarifying flow — a board with excessive granularity can make it harder, not easier, to see where work is actually stuck.
• No regular review of the board/process — without periodic reflection, bottlenecks that appear repeatedly go unaddressed even though the board makes them visible.
• Forcing Kanban onto work that genuinely needs fixed-scope, timeboxed planning — a project with hard external deadlines and fixed scope may fit Scrum's sprint structure better than Kanban's continuous flow.

Learn more

• Scrum for the contrasting fixed-sprint framework.
• Kaizen for the continuous-improvement philosophy Kanban shares.
• Queueing Theory for the underlying flow/utilization mathematics WIP limits are grounded in.