Friday 18 May 2012

Your own personal Kanban board

There's a bit of a Kanban fever happening in this place, and boards are popping up all over. A colleague of mine coined Kanban as "crack for Project Managers" because everyone's become so zealous about it. While Kanban is great for some teams who have a constant flow of work, it may not be applicable to all teams.

One-man Kanban


Kanban boards work really well for large amounts of tasks for the team which need an optimised flow. But did you know you could also scale your Kanban board way down and create your own personal system for organising tasks?

A personal Kanban board is great for Product Owners and Project Managers whose work isn't tracked through the team system.

Here's my own board that I've been experimenting with for a while:


I built this board using the lid from a box of copier paper, and created columns:
  • Backlog - tasks which aren't completely ready to be done or aren't due for a while
  • Queue - tasks which I have a clear idea of what needs to be done, and are high priority enough to be scheduled in to happen asap
  • In progress - the key here is that only 4 sticky notes can fit in this box. This limits the amount of work in progress and keeps me focused.
  • Done - I have a habit of collecting tasks here because it makes me feel accomplished

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