Visual Management BoardAn overview of your project at one glance

People are naturally inclined to quicker understanding of information presented visually, rather than as text. Images and graphs tell any story faster than words, and draw our attention more. For quite a while now, project managers have been using these obvious facts to their projects' benefit - visualising project status on various graphs, charts and stage representations. But out of all available approaches, there is one, deserving special attention, due to sheer simplicity of its application: Kanban.

"Kanban" means a visual sign in Japanese. Applying Kanban asks only two actions of a project manager - to visualise the workflow on a board made of columns, representing process stages, and to limit how many items can be worked on at a time, in any particular stage.

What this does, is remove the need for never-ending questions about current project status to be asked. All a team member or stakeholder needs to do, to get an update on a project, is glance at the Kanban board. Currently processed items are in one place, done work in another, priorities and assignments can also be shown with ease, by use of colors and or tags.

This makes everyone's work a lot easier. Imagine the huge difference between time and engagement needed to organise an actual meeting, during which project requirements are shared and work is assigned to the team, and between the little time and effort required to list project specifics and assign items to team members on a visual board. The end result of both is the same - everyone learns what to do.

But by showing this on a visual board, you'd have not only saved a lot of time, you'd have also created a visualisation of the project, to which everyone can turn, when they need to see the bigger picture. Who's responsible for what, where specific information can be located, what's the overall timeline. A Kanban board is an embodiment of visual management. Before you've had the time to read into project details, your eyes would have already seen the current status, from a single glance at the board:

What's more, is that easier project status understanding is only the first of many benefits, that using a visual board brings. By sharing your project information on an online Kanban board, you will be able to spot and eliminate bottlenecks, streamline the process by observing automatically generated metrics, get better insight into work distribution among the team, build a project archive for future reference, achieve better focus and improve tasks completed versus tasks started ratio and more.

Watch this short video, to learn what specifically makes Kanban Tool the best application of online visual management boards on the market.