My team at work uses a Kanban board to track our software development process. We use Kanban to track tasks and pull new tasks to our respective swim lanes. We use sticky notes to indicate our tasks and move them around to indicate their status, such as “To Develop”, “To Test”, or “Completed”.
Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work which balances demands for work with the available capacity for new work. Work items are visualized to give participants a view of progress and process, from task definition to customer delivery. Team members “pull” work as capacity permits, rather than work being “pushed” into the process when requested.
In software development, for example, Kanban provides a visual process-management system which aids decision-making about what, when and how much to produce. Although the method (inspired by the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing) originated in software development and IT, it may be applied to any professional service whose work outcome is intangible rather than physical.
For fun, I added my baby as a task. And, tracked the sticky all the way to completion… He’s our best feature yet!