Kanban Flow: How to Structure it Effectively
Kanban is a project management methodology that helps visualize your workflow, control the process, and maximize results. A Kanban board is composed of columns, swimlanes, cards, and limits. This helps manage the work processes, eliminates waste, and delivers results faster.
This blog aims to walk you through all the basics you need to know about Kanban flow – what this is, why it’s useful, and how to use it effectively.
What is Kanban flow?
In project management, flow describes how an item or piece of work moves through a business process. Kanban is used to visualize workflow and therefore show how an item moves through a process. Kanban also limits work in progress because limiting the amount of work in progress makes it easier to identify bottlenecks in a team’s delivery pipeline.
This means that team members are not slowing down the process or interrupting the flow. Managing and measuring flow is the act of analyzing how smooth your workflow is and how you could improve it.
A simple Kanban flow
The simplest way to measure Kanban flow is to rely on the most basic 3-column structure common to most Kanban board tools:
- Backlog. All new ideas and work items that are waiting to be worked on.
- Work In Progress. All tasks currently being worked on.
- Done. All completed tasks.
Of course, this is just the start – a primer for how Kanban works. In practice, most Kanban boards end up containing a lot more detail than this. Let’s now look at the three key metrics most often used to measure workflow in Kanban.
Kanban flow metrics
The best way to measure workflow using Kanban is to focus on these three key metrics:
- Cycle time
- Throughput
- Work in progress
Cycle time – This is the average actual time it takes for the team to complete an item from the time they started working on it, measured from the start of the first task to the end of the last task. The key word here is “actual”, as this is not the same as the expected time spent working on the item.
Throughput – Throughput refers to the rate at which a company produces or processes its products or services. In terms of projects, it is typically used to reference the number of units passing through a process in a specific period, usually hours, days, or weeks.
You would typically measure this in terms of the number of cards that pass through your Kanban board during a specific timeframe, eg the life of a project, or over the course of a week.
Work in progress – This is the section on the Kanban board that lists all work currently undertaken by the team but not yet completed. It is important to limit work in progress to avoid multi-tasking, duplication, error, and lack of focus, all of which can impede productivity.
You can read more on these and other key metrics in yhis post – Kanban Estimation – Tools and Best Practices
However, by combining the three metrics above into a cumulative flow diagram (CFD) – also known as a Kanban flow diagram or Kanban flow chart – you will be able to measure your Kanban flow efficiency.
How to read a cumulative flow diagram
The CFD tracks the number of work items in the ‘In Progress’ columns of your Kanban board each day. The horizontal axis represents the period for which the chart is visualizing data. The vertical axis shows the total number of cards in the workflow at various points in time.
The differently colored bands on the chart show the various stages of your workflow as they appear on the Kanban board. These bands will go up or sideways depending on the number of tasks in your process.
Using this Kanban process flow chart, you can see at a glance how long your tasks’ approximate cycle time is. The distance between the lines on the chart will show you where your problems lie.
If your colored bands are progressing in parallel, this means that your throughput is stable. New tasks are entering at a good rate – the same rate that tasks are being completed.
If one of the colored bands is rapidly narrowing, this shows that your throughput is higher than the rate that new tasks are entering your process. You might have overcapacity and need to reassign resources to optimize them.
If one or more of your colored bands is widening rapidly, this means that new cards are entering your process at a faster rate than you can work on them effectively. Your efficiency is lower than it could be, and you may need to review your WIP limits.
Similarly, you could use ‘New vs Completed tasks’ diagram found in Teamhood Agile metrics report.
Structuring Kanban board flow effectively
You now know that by keeping on top of your cumulative flow diagram, you can measure your Kanban board flow. You know when your flow is not effective – so what can you do when that happens?
It’s important to remember that this will depend slightly on the type of project you’re using Kanban boards for.
Using Kanban to structure marketing content
For content marketing, use your To-Do column for upcoming content pieces you’re planning to work on. To make it more accurate, split it into two sections – new ideas and commited ideas.
Take the In-Progress column and split it into sub-columns to effectively track child items like Research, Writing, Reviewing, Editing, Design, and Final Review.
Then add a column for what items are currently In Campaign. And one last section for completed initiatives.
Looking for the best tool to implement this? Check out the comparison of KanbanFlow vs Trello vs Teamhood.
Using Kanban to structure software development
Here it makes sense to make each product feature a separate card. As well as the usual To-Do, In-Progress, and Done columns, add a Backlog column ahead of To-Do. That way, you’ll be able to keep track of your backlog tasks too.
This is just a taste of how you can use Kanban boards to structure your workflow effectively. For more practical Kanban board examples, check out this post.
Ready to start using Kanban flow methodology for your projects?
Knowing how best to use Kanban to improve your workflow is vital for success. Hopefully, this blog has given you a useful introduction for how to start thinking about Kanban flow and Kanban efficiency. That way, you should now be able to visualize how Kanban could be useful in helping to manage your workflow effectively.
Find out more about how Teamhood’s flexible Kanban system works, or book a demo to see how it could work for you:
