Kanban Boards - Practical Examples

What Is a Kanban Board?

A Kanban board is a visual tool for enabling Kanban to manage work for any business. The board helps the team to track each of their work items, minimize idle time, improve predictability, increase quality, and reduce time-to-market.

Sample Kanban Boards

Let's dive-in into a few practical examples when teams manage their work via the Kanban approach.

Consider a scenario that a DevOps team receives several requests each day to automate build process in Jenkins, resolve test environment issues, onboard new applications onto the hybrid cloud, and so on. Here’s a sample Kanban board for such a scenario.

Sample Kanban Board - DevOps

The second example is of an operations team that receives several calls during the day from its customers and works together to analyze reported issues, provide real-time guidance, and execute fixes to a customer-facing application. Here’s a sample Kanban board for such a scenario.

Next, let's consider a scenario that a software development team receives new requests on a regular basis to build new capabilities and enhance existing application features. This team targets to deliver a quality code and invests time in peer code reviews and application testing. Here’s a sample Kanban board for such a scenario.

Another example is of an organization’s legal team that receives requests on a regular basis from different portfolios in the organization to review content on their sites, campaigns, offers, etc. from a legal point of view. Here’s a sample Kanban board for such a scenario.

Let's take a practical example of a platform team that receives multiple requests from different application teams every day. Here’s a sample Kanban board to visually track their onboarding requests.

One of the examples of a personal Kanban board is to track the process when buying a new home. In order to track the various tasks and reduce distractions, you create a Kanban Board with a WIP limit of 2 home viewings. Here’s a sample board for such a scenario. 

Next, let's consider another example of a personal Kanban board. In this scenario, you need to sort your house over the weekend. You decide to organize your work and reduce task-switching by creating a Kanban board. Here’s a sample board for such a scenario. 

Now that you have seen a few sample Kanban boards, will you be able to create one for yourself? Share your board in the comments section below. Don't forget to apply a WIP (Work-In-Progress) limit to your board.

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• Expert Agile Tips and Techniques
• Scrum and Kanban: Same or Different? Which one is better?
• What are the 12 Agile Principles? Learn, Apply, and Be Agile!
• What is a Sprint Burndown Chart? - Agile Scrum Framework
• Differences between Waterfall and Agile
• 5 Habits that Successful Leaders Have
• 7 Traits of High-Performing People

Other Books on Agile and Lean:

• The Basics Of Agile and Lean
• The Basics Of Scrum
• The Basics Of Kanban
• Enterprise Agility with OKRs