Kanban Management
What is Kanban Project Management?
Kanban is a methodology for managing work. In contrast to methods that emphasize planning in advance, Kanban focuses on workers pulling work only when they have capacity, avoiding starting too much work, and representing work visually. The visual representation is typically a board with columns for each stage in a workflow, where each column contains cards that represent work in that stage, and cards move from left to right as the work gets closer to completion. This is known as a Kanban board.
The ideas behind Kanban began at Toyota in Japan in the 1940s and initially focussed on manufacturing. Over the last 20 years, Kanban and related agile practices have been widely adopted in the the software development industry, and Kanban is now taking over the MSP and IT services provider industry.
What is Kanban Project Management?
Kanban is a methodology for managing work. In contrast to methods that emphasize planning in advance, Kanban focuses on workers pulling work only when they have capacity, avoiding starting too much work, and representing work visually.
The visual representation is typically a board with columns for each stage in a workflow, where each column contains cards that represent work in that stage, and cards move from left to right as the work gets closer to completion. This is known as a Kanban board.
Integrations are available at the ConnectWise Marketplace.
Benefits of Kanban Project Management
Managing projects with Kanban methods can offer some great advantages to a team:
- Offering a single view of all project work for the whole team, eliminating miscommunication and confusion
- Identifying bottlenecks by showing which columns and lanes have a higher-than-average number of cards
- Improving responsiveness to customers by focusing on priority of work instead of putting work into a calendar well in the future
- Improving efficiency by emphasizing finishing work (and getting it off the board) instead of starting new work
- Preventing work from falling through the cracks, because neglected tickets, tasks and projects are highlighted
About TopLeft Kanban Boards for Project Management
TopLeft offers Kanban boards for ConnectWise and Autotask MSPs. Kanban boards show project tickets and tasks in columns by status and in lanes by project or engineer. This makes it easy to see exactly what project work is started, what’s neglected, and what’s coming up. It shows how work is distributed between your projects and members. It also makes it easy to see the status of your entire project portfolio, including each project in a specialized workflow such as customer onboarding or Azure migrations.
Reasons to Use TopLeft Kanban Boards for Project Management
With TopLeft Kanban you can:
- Manage your whole project portfolio at once
- Understand the state of all work in your projects
- Visualize your start and end date commitments- so you can finally meet them!
- See who’s assigned to each ticket and see who has too much or too little work assigned
- See neglected work and bottlenecks in your project flow
- Communicate clearly about the priority of work
It doesn’t just help projects- Kanban is great for managing service and sales work too!
And because Kanban shows data straight out of ConnectWise or Autotask, you can keep all your data in your PSA database and avoid wasting time entering data in separate systems.