Beyond the Board: Why a ‘Kanban View’ Isn’t Enough

From Trello to Salesforce, everyone seems to be jumping on the Kanban bandwagon these days. Kanban has become so popular that most collaboration software now provides a “Kanban view.” 

But are these simplified task boards or drag-and-drop card interfaces actually Kanban? Or are they missing the point entirely?

Let’s explore what a Kanban view versus Kanban is, and why the distinction is far greater than semantics.

Kanban

From task boards to inventory management, a true Kanban system operates on deeper principles than simply moving cards across a value stream. To define Kanban, let’s take a look at three sources that have contributed to shaping Kanban’s body of knowledge. It’s important to note that for this post, we are addressing Kanban for knowledge work and not Kanban’s original roots in manufacturing.

Here are the sources we used for this article:

1. Personal Kanban from Modus Institute
2. Kanban Method from Kanban University
3. Professional Kanban from ProKanban.org

Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria, founders of Modus Institute, creators and authors of Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, define Personal Kanban as having two explicit rules: Visualize Work and Limit Work In Progress (WIP).

Visualizing work is common to all expressions of Kanban, as Kanban translates from Japanese as a “signboard” or “visual card.” This is what a Kanban view will provide: a way to visualize work as cards on a board. 

That’s it.

While visualizing work provides benefits because the work and its state are made explicit, it’s not enough. ‘’Much like cars on a freeway, work likewise should not fit – it should flow,” Tonianne DeMaria shares. For that to occur, much like the barriers channeling cars safely on a freeway, or even the banks of a river – you need that beneficial constraint to promote flow and prevent flood. That’s where the WIP limit comes in. 

Without limiting the number of cards in specific columns, you are essentially flooded with work (which promotes an inability to focus and finish with quality). Once you add WIP limits by stating the maximum number of cards you may have in flight at any given time, you can begin managing your flow of work.

For example, if you have only two people who can work in a column, they should set a WIP limit of two or three cards to ensure that this column respects the workers’ capacity. This will ensure that these workers do not take more than they can and only take on new work if the column has fewer cards than the WIP limit.

This rule, on its own, will create flow as cards must move out of a column at a consistent completion rate without having work accumulate and creating a bottleneck.

You can see the impact of using WIP limits using a simulation like Featureban from Mike Burrows. These simulations clearly show how introducing WIP limits increases a team’s productivity.

Kanban View

Showing work as visual cards on a board with columns that flow from left to right into a Done column to pull work from ideation to completion is a Kanban view. This is a good way to start using Kanban, and it will provide the crucial benefit of visualizing your work.

Tools like Trello and Salesforce provide Kanban views, and in both cases, it’s enough to provide users with the ability to create and move cards along a process represented as columns in a board. For Trello, which is a essentially a to-do list tool, having columns holding cards that can be viewed as to-do lists in columns will let you prioritize your work and flow it to a Done column. For Salesforce, lead tracking is shown on a board that lets you track your leads as visual cards through each step of your sales process until a deal is won or lost. 

In both cases, these tools provide views based on Kanban tracking the work. Many tools, like Monday and ClickUp, even call these views Kanban. Still, unfortunately, they miss out on crucial benefits that Kanban does to continuously improve the way you work. As mentioned above, at minimum, Kanban must also set WIP limits.

Kanban System

In addition to visualizing work and having WIP limits, other practices are expressed in the Kanban Method from David J. Anderson at Kanban University. These extend to  managing flow, making policies explicit, implementing feedback loops, and improving collaboratively, evolving experimentally.

At Kanban Zone, we fully embrace these Kanban practices as Software as a Service (SaaS) and you can dive much deeper into each of these practices below:

• Visualize Work
• Limit Work in Progress (WIP)
• Make Policies Explicit
• Measure and Manage Flow
• Implement Feedback Loops
• Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally

Daniel Vacanti, who co-authored the Kanban Guides at ProKanban.org with John Coleman from Kanplexity, focuses on these three practices:

• Defining and visualizing a workflow
• Actively managing items in a workflow
• Improving a workflow

As expected, visualizing a workflow is the first step, but they introduce the term Kanban system when you implement the three Kanban practices above and these 4 Kanban Measures below:

• WIP
• Throughput
• Work Item Age
• Cycle Time

If you are planning your weekend or just tracking tasks alone, then a simple Kanban view might be all you need to organize your work. But as soon as you collaborate with others and start to seek ways to improve your workflows, that’s when you need a Kanban system. The distinction is important.

It’s okay to start with just visualizing your work, but if you want to get better and understand where to improve your workflow, then you should also implement the practices mentioned above, which we will explain with examples below.

Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

In Kanban Zone, we provide both a minimum and maximum WIP. 

Maximum WIP

This is the maximum amount of work you should have for a step in your workflow. This is required on any WIP column on your board and sometimes can help in other types of columns to prevent work from accumulating. Once you reach the maximum WIP in Kanban Zone, you can choose to be alerted or prevented from moving more cards to this column.

If you choose to go over your limit, then be sure to come back below it fast. If you find yourself constantly going over, then maybe the limit you have set is too low, but be sure to use your Kanban metrics to justify this change.

Minimum WIP

This is the minimum amount of work you should have for a step in your workflow. It’s optional but helps protect your team from starvation by always expecting at least a minimum number of cards in a column. If you can’t pull this minimum amount of work, your process is having issues upstream (before this column on your board), and you should understand why your work cannot flow efficiently to this column.

Kanban Zone makes it easy for teams to implement maximum and minimum WIP limits efficiently with its flexible board designer.

Leveraging minimum and maximum WIP limits is something you keep adjusting as you add/remove members on your team or your process changes. At first, there is no perfect way to set these WIP limits, so consider the number of people who can work in a column and set the limit to the number of people plus one. This is not a scientific formula, but it will get you started with a number you can adjust based on feedback from your team.

Make Policies Explicit

This is one of my favorite practices in Kanban because it’s simple but provides tremendous efficiency by ensuring that everything your team needs to know about your process is clearly readable in each column of your board. Once you have created your columns on your board, you should explain what it will take to exit each column. These are often referred to as the definition of done for a Column, and we provide a way to enforce these as exit criteria that, if not met, will prevent you from moving a card.

We like using bullets or short sentences to capture process policies. Here is an example of a few standard columns on boards:

Review

• Read all the information on the card
• Ask and get answers to all your questions
• Document any changes in the card
  

Implement

• Complete all the work defined on the card
• Ask for help or raise concerns if anything is not clear
• Test all your work before moving it forward

Verify

• Review all test cases, outcomes, or acceptance criteria
• Mark as pass or fail every test to execute
• Log issues found directly on the card to evaluate a resolution now or later

The examples above are very generic. Use these as inspiration, but work with your team to provide more detailed or helpful explicit agreements for your board. These save you so much time when you onboard someone new on your team; they can read and understand at a glance what is expected of them.

Creating explicit agreements for every column/step on your board makes it easier for your team members to accomplish tasks properly the first time with less confusion. Try it with Kanban Zone!

By adding explicit agreements to each step on your board, anyone looking at your board will quickly assess why a card is in a column. Ultimately, making your process explicit is the ideal way to ensure consistency and that everyone on the team can improve the process by clarifying each step.

Measure and Manage Flow

How can you know you are doing good if you don’t have a way to measure it? It sounds obvious, but so many teams don’t have or take the time to self-assess their flow of work so that they can celebrate their success and continuously improve. This is where Kanban Zone’s metrics feature can come in handy. Here are some of the most important Kanban metrics your team should be tracking:

Throughput

Throughput measures how many work items (cards on your board) reach the Done column. The beauty of this metric is that it shows your actual performance, and over time, can be averaged to set expectations.

For example, 4 consecutive weeks, your team completes 5 + 3 + 7 + 5 cards each week, totaling to 20 cards. If you divide this total by the number of weeks (20 cards / 4 weeks), this means your team is averaging 5 cards completed per week. Your team should seek to always have at least 5 cards ready to pull into WIP every week. If they don’t, they might run out of work. 

Please be aware that throughput is not a wishful metric. You must respect it. It serves as a way for a team to protect themselves from overpromising and setting wrong expectations. You must look at a running average, which may change over time.

The above throughput report sample shows the number of hours spent on each type of task every month. With Kanban Zone’s advanced metrics feature, you can easily track your productivity depending on what metrics work best for you.

The biggest concern with using Throughput is that the cards might not all be the same size. In Kanban Zone, we show you this throughput for your entire board or specific types of work. Ultimately, Kanban teams will be able to set a sweet spot for the size of their cards, making them all roughly the same size.

Lead/Cycle Time

This measures how long your work takes from when it’s captured (Lead Time) or when you start working on it (Cycle Time). It’s often referred to as the time it took according to your customer (Lead Time) vs the time it truly took internally to get it done once it was in our hands (Cycle Time). This helps you understand the responsiveness of your team or process.

For example, if the last 4 cards you completed took in hours 10h + 20h + 5h + 5h = 40 hours, by dividing 40 hours with 4 cards, this gives you an average of 10 hours per card. Your cycle time is 10 hours, so the next card you pull in WIP should take around 10 hours. This is a great way to provide estimates without actually having to estimate, letting your data and not emotions set the expectation.

Easily monitor your cycle time with Kanban Zone. The above sample shows weekly cycle time for 4 different types of card. 

In Kanban Zone, we show you the lead or cycle time for your entire board or specific types of work. We also provide the exact time spent in each column of your board so you can know precisely where your cards are getting stuck. You can use this data in our Performance Tuning report.

There are many other Kanban metrics you can leverage, like Time Distribution, Flow Efficiency, and Cumulative Flow, to name a few. We are fanatics about metrics at Kanban Zone, so we provide you with all your data that you can slice and dice how you need using our Table zone.

When to Transition from a Kanban View to a Kanban System

If you are planning your weekend or just starting out managing your work, a basic Kanban view might be all you need. It’s a simple, effective way to visualize your tasks and help keep your work organized. However, once you start to collaborate with a team or manage more complex workflows, a Kanban view alone may fall short. Here are signs that it’s time to transition from a Kanban view to a full Kanban system:

• You’re Experiencing Bottlenecks. If work accumulates in certain columns without flowing consistently, it’s a clear indicator that your workflow needs improvements. A Kanban system with WIP limits and flow management metrics will help identify and address these bottlenecks.
• Complex Workflow. If your team needs to split columns into sub-columns or rows into swimlanes, then you will need more than a Kanban view that provides a simple board layout. The reason we built Kanban Zone is to provide such design flexibility for your workflows.
• Team Overload. If team members constantly feel overwhelmed or underutilized, a Kanban system’s practice of managing WIP limits ensures work is ideally distributed.
• Lack of Continuous Improvement. When your team is not improving its processes or doesn’t have a structured way to adapt and evolve, practices like feedback loops and explicit policies can guide effective change.
• Need for Performance Insights. If you find it hard to assess how well your team is performing or where improvements can be made, adopting metrics such as throughput and cycle time in a Kanban system will provide clear insights.

Starting with a Kanban view is perfectly fine, but as your team grows or your work becomes more complex, transitioning to a full Kanban system will provide the structure and practices needed for continuous improvement and sustainable productivity.

Are you ready to design your ideal Kanban system?

I hope you are now more familiar with Kanban and ready to use a Kanban view to visualize your work. Don’t forget that a board without WIP limits is just a bunch of work that will keep you busy but not make you effective. So don’t settle for just a Kanban view. Set your WIP limits, explain clearly how to use your board directly on your board, check your productivity data to understand your trend, and make the right decisions.

You can start by leveraging our extensive library of board templates and book a free consulting session with one of our Kanban experts.