How to Use Kanban to Streamline Your IT Operations

Kanban has proven to be a very effective tool for various businesses and operations. It is a very versatile project management platform, which makes it easier for companies and teams of varying sizes and compositions to incorporate in their existing processes. This is why it’s also a good idea for companies to use Kanban in IT operations. But how do you use a Kanban to effectively improve your IT processes?

Ways to Manage IT Tasks Using a Kanban Board

Given its flexibility, a Kanban board can help you keep track of all your IT tasks in different ways. Here are some of them:

1. By Type of Demand

Whether you want to better track weekly routines, unexpected demands or tasks under new projects, you can use Kanban in IT operations to easily monitor different sorts of demand at work. You can take advantage of a Kanban board’s swimlanes to group tasks together based on their specific demand. This will allow you to get a better view of the workload that you have, be it planned or not. And with better visibility of your pending IT tasks, you can have a better understanding of how a certain task can impact the team’s capacity to accomplish goals on time.

2. By Priorities

IT teams also have to deal with changes in work priorities, but using a virtual can help you deal with these changes. Virtual Kanban boards use priority icons that help everyone using the board know how urgent a specific task is. This makes it easy for your team to understand where to focus first. You can use these icons to set the priority of a task from Low, Medium, High or Critical. You can also use a Block icon to let everyone know that a specific card is not to be worked on at the moment. It also helps that you provide details why a specific task card should be prioritized or is placed on hold.

3. By team or team member’s specialization

If you have micro teams within your IT department, you can also set up individual swimlanes for each of your micro teams. This can help each team identify which tasks they have pending, without worrying about the other micro teams’ tasks. This setup can also work for small businesses who have a one-man IT team. To avoid bottlenecks, you can set up work-in-progress (WIP) limits for each team. This helps the team stick to the process without lagging behind or overloading the system, which can result in further work delays.

4. By Process

Another way to optimize the use of Kanban in IT operations is by setting up your tasks based on process. One of the best features of most virtual Kanban boards is that you get to set up as many swimlanes and sublanes as you need. This allows you to group Kanban cards together according to the process that each card needs to go through. Most IT operations involve a complexity of tasks, wherein apart from keeping a company’s IT infrastructure operational, some IT teams also need to help with system integration, vendor and supplier management, data management and more. By setting up individual lanes for each process, your IT team can visualize the workflow better and improve the team’s overall efficiency in completing tasks.

Benefits of Using Kanban in IT Operations

No matter how you use Kanban in IT operations, be it for monitoring tasks by process, priority, specialization or demand, a virtual Kanban board can definitely help you optimize your IT team’s productivity. Using Kanban in IT operations can help improve your IT team’s:

1. Efficiency

With a Kanban board, you have a better means of visualizing your team’s workflow, making it easier for everyone to keep track of pending tasks and eliminate bottlenecks across all processes. This helps you get more tasks done in less time.

2. Team dynamics

Using Kanban in IT operations helps improve your team’s coordination when it comes to completing multiple tasks. With better cooperation among team members, your team can complete your tasks with less or no team-related issues.

3. Operations

Having a clear visual of your processes is important, especially for IT teams wherein a lot of complex tasks and processes are involved. By using Kanban for IT, your team can keep your operation smooth and keep tasks flowing from To-Do status to Done.

4. Process flow

In the IT field, it’s important to make sure that every stop within your process flow is followed to the T. This helps your team make sure that no problems arise, just because a step was skipped. Such errors can be costly. But with a Kanban board, you can make sure that all of your tasks go through the right process flow.

5. Communication

Another great benefit of using Kanban in IT operations is that it helps improve your team’s overall communication. You can relay messages more easily and share files and links with your teammates to help get tasks done.

The Bottom Line

No matter how big or small your IT team is, it’s important to give them the right tools to help them accomplish their tasks. With a virtual Kanban board like Kanban Zone, you can enhance your IT team’s efficiency and make sure that everyone in the team is properly coordinated.