What is Kanban Tool?The original application for Kanban

How does Kanban Tool work?

In Kanban Tool you can create your Kanban board and allow access to it for your team members, so that you can all track progress of work, together. A Kanban board should consist of at least three columns: a backlog one, in which you gather all tasks that need doing, an in progress one, into which you're pulling tasks when you're ready for a new assignment, and a done column - where all completed tasks end up and from where they can be archived to serve an analytical purpose. Of course, there can be as many columns as you need, each representing a particular stage in your specific work process.

Is it difficult to get started?

Absolutely not! At the beginning you'll see a "getting started" board with a quick tour of the service, showing you how things work. Also, whenever you create a new board, you'll be given a choice of a number of template boards, designed to suit different businesses (product development, sales pipeline, marketing) or approaches to work (time-driven, event-driven or basic). Therefore, it is easy to just start working with a pre-set board, and adapt it to your individual needs as you go, since board edition is possible at any moment.

Once you have your board set, you can start creating task cards. There is a basic card template set for you at the beginning, but it can be customized by yourself in just one moment (both the kind of information and the order in which it appears on the card, not to mention the color). And having your board and cards ready, you can start doing Kanban. Create tasks, assign them to people, prioritize, add attachments, comments and checklists - and start pulling tasks to your "in progress" column. With Kanban Tool you can set a limit to how many tasks may be in any column of the board, but the most important one is the 'in progress' one. This is how you'll turn your workflow from average to extra productive.

What's to be gained from using Kanban Tool?

By applying Kanban Tool to your work, you will massively increase your team's productivity - possibly by as much as 56%, as in this example. Thanks to the limit on the work in progress, people have the advantage of being able to focus on just one thing at a time, hence do the work much better. By having all the information present in front of them, your team gets much better organized and informed, also there's little room for communication slip-ups and missed due dates. The fact, that the boards are accessible to the team online, means they are always up to date and free to work from home or even have a working holiday, and stay as efficient as if they were at the office. All in all, applying Kanban Tool to your business can only be beneficial, and at a scale that you would likely never have anticipated!