COVID-19 Pandemic Preparedness Plan in Kanban – World Health Organization

As this world pandemic hit our global community, we wanted to find a way to provide help. In times like this, it’s key to understand your specific strengths and focus on these to help others. In our case, we provide the ability to create online Kanban boards and we have a team of Kanban experts, so we decided to research ways to visualize a plan to handle a pandemic.

Since a Kanban board is a visual representation of a process, we went straight to the World Health Organization and were provided a process document that focused on providing the essential steps for developing or updating a national pandemic influenza preparedness plan. We immediately transformed this process into a visual Kanban board that anyone can use for free in Kanban Zone.

Why a Kanban board?

Documents are great to provide in-depth information about a subject, but even if they provide all the information to do something, it lacks the format to actually take action. It’s like having a great vision, but no way to execute it.

Instead of flipping through pages to find what you are looking for and then still figure out how to communicate and deliver the work… Just convert the information into a visual Kanban board. The first step is to extract the actionable information into Kanban cards and then to map these cards on a visual process flow that will ensure that all the cards get completed. Here is what it looks like:

How to use this board?

The document provided 3 phases and within each phase, there were clear steps to complete that phase. You will see that each phase has its own column to pull cards from and also its own color to quickly identify cards from each phase. Because many of these steps are sequential, we kept the numbering sequence, so that you can easily make sure that you follow the ideal way to pull the work according to the experts at the World Health Organization.

Each step within a phase became a card on the board. When you open any card, you will find all the information needed to deliver on this step. Since the document provided clear tasks to deliver each step, we also created tasks within each card to track the progress, but also assign a clear owner for each task. You can also assign due dates and collaborate on these cards to ensure that everyone involved knows exactly what going on.

This is how the first step looks in the document:

This is how the first step looks as a Kanban card:

Need more help to fight this pandemic?

We are dedicated to making a positive change in the world and the best way we know to achieve that goal is by leveraging the Kanban methodology. We did not invent Kanban, but we believe that we created the ideal online Kanban solution to help anyone benefit from this approach.

We are proud to always offer our Community Outreach program. So if you are negatively impacted by COVID-19 and we can help your community through this period, then contact us and let’s make a difference together.

Essential steps for developing or updating a national pandemic influenza preparedness plan. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2018. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.