5. Kanban

Now for one of the most popular and most versatile tools used in Agile working: Kanban. Kanban can be immensely useful to visualize work and create transparency. It essentially stands on its own and can even be used out of an Agile context. No matter whether you are using classic project management (e.g. waterfall), Agile or any other form of organising, in many cases Kanban can be beneficial.

The basic idea behind it is to simply visualize the path that every single Element goes through, from start to finish. For that to work, Kanban uses board with cards to visualise their status. The change of the cards’ position reflects the development in the process.

In an ideal scenario this means that you can identify bottlenecks in your process very quickly and can start to improve it to achieve better flow, leading to a more efficient process. As a result, it is one of the favourite tools of many Agile teams.

There are many use cases in which Kanban could be used. Who knows, maybe your marketing team is already using one to organise their workflow or to schedule creating and publishing content?

In this chapter we will guide you through the basics behind Kanban so you can start experimenting with it right away.