Kanban planning is an easy way to prioritize tasks and improve workflow in HR departments. This guide covers the basic principles of Kanban planning, how it can work for HR departments, the templates you could use, and how to get started.
Key Takeaways:
- Kanban planning is a budget-friendly way of improving workflows, which is particularly helpful if your budget has been cut or frozen.
- Using Kanban principles in HR departments has five key benefits – improving clarity, reducing multitasking, minimizing downtime, improving task allocation, and boosting efficiency.
- You can get started with Kanban quickly and easily by breaking down goals into smaller steps and using pre-build Kanban templates.
Introducing Kanban Planning
Kanban planning is an innovative method for improving process performance. It involves visualizing each workflow on a Kanban board and breaking each project into manageable tasks or work items.
When implemented correctly, Kanban planning can help HR teams better manage and prioritize tasks to keep the entire department running smoothly. This is particularly important in specific industries – for example, recruitment in finance can take months.
With Kanban planning, you can break down team needs ahead of time to establish effective succession planning and recruitment stages. Kanban can also be used to identify areas that need automation the most. You can add automated tasks into Kanban to visualize your HR team’s workflow.
Why Kanban Planning is Important for HR Teams in 2024
Using simple but proven solutions like Kanban planning to visualize and track tasks sets the groundwork for future success. It’s also crucial when budgets are tight – which they currently are.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 2024 is the year of tightened purse strings, with 60% of HR leaders responding that their budget has either decreased or stayed the same, which means cost-friendly methods like Kanban are crucial for improving workflows in 2024 and beyond.
Kanban for HR Task Prioritization
Kanban is an excellent tool for simplifying task allocation and improving team efficiency. It does this in five key ways.
1. Creates Clarity and Transparency
Kanban boards provide a simple visual representation of all the tasks a team must do, are doing, and have completed. Since everyone can see what’s being worked on at a glance, it improves clarity and transparency among the whole team.
2. Limits Multitasking to Keep Projects Completed on Time
Kanban is frequently used to set limits on tasks in progress. This prevents HR teams from becoming overwhelmed. By limiting WIP tasks, you keep your team focused on improving efficiency.
3. Easily Identify Bottlenecks
Since every task is broken down into bite-size stages, you can quickly note bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your operation. How? Simply note the number of tasks at a particular stage and work to fix the issue.
Note that some long-running tasks may need a new workflow (for example, an automation program), and others must be broken down more thoroughly (for example, ten candidate interviews instead of all of them at once).
4. Minimize Downtime
Bringing in a new staff member or team leader can cause massive delays as the newcomer tries to catch up with what’s been done and what is still on the to-do list. If you’ve adopted Kanban principles, new staff can easily see what is currently being done, has been done, and needs to be done immediately. This helps everyone on the team get up to speed faster, minimizing downtime.
5. Improve Task Allocation
You can assign specific tasks to different team members. This promotes accountability since everyone can easily see how much every staff member does and accomplishes at once. If you also use time tracking, it can help you set better standards and identify more employee-specific bottlenecks. If one employee goes on leave or moves on from the team, those tasks can also easily be reassigned since you can quickly select all functions the person was doing and was going to do in the future.
Combining Kanban Principles with Automation
Automation is big this year and will only become more prominent in HR departments as tools are refined and developed. The good news is you can use your Kanban planner to identify the areas that need to be automated.
For example, if recruitment tasks take a long time due to high resume volume, you can use recruitment workflow automation. This software frees up your team by pre-selecting resumes, sending automated emails to candidates, and more. You can then remove these tasks from your board, reducing clutter and keeping your Kanban board focused and ready to go.
Types of Kanban Templates
There are many different types of Kanban templates, but HR teams should use a basic, swimlane, or two-track template.
Basic
This is a straightforward Kanban template that can easily be customized as needed. A basic template has three columns: ‘To Do’, ‘Doing’, and ‘Done’. If you are a small HR department (or a solo HR employee), then a basic template is all you need to get started with Kanban principles.
Swimlanes
Larger departments will need a more fluid approach to adopting Kanban principles and should consider a swimlane-type template. Swimlanes allow you to represent different projects within your HR team. This way, you can separate your everyday tasks from your hiring projects.
Two-Track
Another way to approach Kanban within your HR team is with a two-track template. This is a hierarchical approach that lets you separate tasks by speed. This is an easy way to deal with backlog since it allows you to visualize long-term projects like succession planning without cluttering your everyday duties.
How to Start Using Kanban Planning Principles for Effective HR Task Prioritization
Kanban is such a straightforward approach to task management that every HR department should try using it to see if it improves their task prioritization. If you want to get started with Kanban principles today, begin with these steps:
1. Identify and Break Down Tasks
There are two ways you can start analyzing and breaking down your workflows with Kanban principles in mind.
One way is to start by analyzing workflows, which you can do with task tracking. Once you’ve begun tracking the tasks you and your team are working on, you can put them into a Kanban template.
Another way to analyze and organize workflows is to start with the end goal (for example, hiring a new employee, improving onboarding processes, managing compliance, or organizing employee records) and work backward through the steps needed to get there. Break the process down into as many steps as possible, ready to be put into your Kanban board.
2. Choose Your Kanban Template
The next step is to choose a Kanban template. You can use the ready-made HR templates in Kanban Zone or start with a basic, swimlane, or two-track template and customize it as you see fit. The right template for you will depend on how many tasks you handle, the size of your team, and the size of the company you work for.
3. Set WIP Limits
You need to work with your staff to understand what everyone can reasonably do at once. Use the information you took from your task-tracking efforts to help you set work-in-progress limits. The limits will also depend on the nature of each task. Small tasks like updating an employee’s records can easily be added without overloading your team.
An excellent way to set reasonable limits is to weigh each task. You can do this from 1 to 5, with 1 representing small, easy-to-accomplish tasks that take a few minutes at most and 5 representing the most complex or time-heavy tasks. You can then work out how many points your team can handle at any one time and use that to set your WIP limits.
4. Set Task Priorities
Another way to structure your tasks is by priority. You can indicate priority using a simple visual system such as color. This way, you can ensure that high-priority tasks are picked up and finished before lower-priority tasks.
5. Set Daily Meetings
Your team must have a say on the tasks currently being worked on in order to feel invested and productive. Set regular focus meetings so everyone can better negotiate the tasks they are working on. You can also use these meetings to set accurate priority flags and resource weightings for each task.
6. Make Improvements
Watch out for bottlenecks in your workflows, and strategize how to improve them. Run regular brainstorming sessions on organizing your Kanban planner and task workflows better so everyone continues to work efficiently, ensuring tasks are done on time and in order of priority.
Final Thoughts
Kanban planning is a simple but very effective way to break down tasks and visualize them. By implementing your Kanban planning with a highly versatile tool such as Kanban Zone, you can start improving the efficiency of your entire HR team and, most importantly, improve task prioritization so those high-priority projects get done faster. Get started with Kanban Zone today!
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