With today’s growth in every segment of industry, success has become all about optimized performance, projects have become larger in scale and more complex, and the teams have become proportionally bigger as well. Now, we have teams of 10 people working on projects with dozens of tasks spanning a couple of months. The challenge isn’t only to coordinate those employees and organize the workflow, but also to do this as effectively as possible for the best, fastest and most profitable results.

To solve the problem of the overall organization of tasks and employees on a project, there are now many different project management methodologies which are adopted by large and small companies alike. One of the most popular of these is Kanban.

In this article, we’re going to explore what Kanban is and what its benefits are. We’ll also take a look at the implementation of the Kanban method within Insightful PC activity software.

So, let’s begin!

What Is Kanban?

Even though this methodology only gained traction worldwide in the past decade, Kanban isn’t a new idea. Its roots can be traced back to the manufacturing process employed in Toyota. The main goal of this revolutionary strategy was to align the production to the availability and consumption of materials. Today, the Kanban system isn’t restricted to manufacturing processes and physical materials any more, but the underlying principle remains.

The modern implementation of the Kanban methodology revolves around the idea that the workload and the flow of tasks and processes should be aligned to employee capacity, whether in terms of the number of employees or the amount of time that each process takes. As such, Kanban is especially popular in the field of software development, but it’s also applied in other industries, such as marketing or human resources. And even though Kanban started off in a form of a physical board with cards, now it’s mostly implemented in a virtual environment, the most representative example of which is project management software Trello.

The central part of the Kanban project methodology is a Kanban board. This is a visual representation of an ongoing project, including all the tasks assigned to different employees which are arranged in several columns. There is a minimum of three columns - ‘To Do’, containing all the task cards that are in the pipeline, ‘In Progress’, where you stack all the tasks that employees are currently working on, and ‘Done’, where completed tasks are transferred.

There are a couple of points that distinguish Kanban from other project management methodologies. First, Kanban flow runs in continuity and there are no fixed stages or cycles. And secondly, it places great emphasis on limiting work in progress. This is in accordance with the basic principle of doing only as many tasks as you can, and it’s usually incorporated by putting a limit on the number of tasks that are in the ‘In Progress’ column at any given time.

The Benefits of Using Kanban

The popularity of this methodology isn’t without a good reason. So, let’s go over some of the benefits of adopting Kanban.

First and foremost, a huge advantage is the flexibility that’s allowed both in planning and during execution. Since, as we’ve said, there are no fixed long-term procedures, the manager can change the order and priority of the tasks on hold without affecting employees who work on the tasks in progress. This also leads to increased focus among employees because they only concentrate on the work in progress.

Another benefit of the Kanban method is transparency and visibility. All of the tasks are on the Kanban board, clearly sorted and assigned, so everyone on the team can see what’s currently in progress and what should be done next. This enables easier collaboration and less intrusion on the part of the manager.

Lastly, Kanban also puts a lot of emphasis on the optimization of time cycles (the period between first starting a task and shipping it to the client) and bottlenecks. This relies on the fact that there should be only a small limited number of ongoing tasks, which means that you’ll be able to quickly detect where the bottlenecks are and work on fixing them. Similarly, time cycles are always aimed to be as short as possible, so that no single task holds up the progress queue. Ultimately, this kind of system leads to faster output as well.

Kanban in Insightful PC Activity Software

We mentioned that some project management systems are designed to reflect the Kanban methodology. However, other tools can also have certain features that would enable managers to organize projects this way. One of these tools is PC activity software like Insightful, which are extremely useful in all stages of a project life cycle, but this particular one has a very straightforward approach to utilizing the Kanban project management methodology. In this section, we’re going to see how the Kanban board is implemented in Insightful.

Within this time tracking system, your team’s Kanban board can be found in the manager dashboard, in Projects Tracking view. When you navigate to this section, you’ll first see a list of all active projects, along with some information about each, such as how many employees are assigned on the project, how many tasks there are, custom hourly rate, etc. Also, you can add, edit, archive or delete projects from here.

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But the real fun begins when you click on one of your active projects - this is where you’ll find your Kanban board and a lot more data on the project! However, we’re only going to focus on the former now, which you can see right at the top of the page, in a section called Tasks. There are four columns - To Do, On Hold, In Progress, and Done. Each column contains task cards and you can review some of the information about a task right in the board, such as who’s working on it and when the deadline is. Also, you can easily move tasks from one column to another by dragging and dropping.

To add a task, simply click on Add New Task button, either at the top of the Tasks section above the Kanban board, or directly at the bottom of the column you want to add a task to. This will open up a New task window. Here, you can enter the name of the task, set a due date, status (which column you want the task in) and priority, add a description, and assign employees to the task.

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Even though this PC activity software doesn’t let employees see the whole Kanban board, it does give them an overview of their own tasks, along with all the necessary information, and they can also move their tasks from one column to another by changing their status.

The real beauty of this feature is that if you have time tracking software like Insightful, even though it’s generally a great combination with a project management tool, you don’t really need the latter because you already have that kind of functionality and you can additionally track the time, analyze productivity and all that other stuff that comprises PC activity software.

Conclusion

With its flexibility and optimized flow, the Kanban methodology has every opportunity to become even more popular and widely used. A testament to this is the fact that it’s implemented even in PC activity software, as we’ve seen in the example of Insightful. Hopefully, adopting this system will help you better organize your projects and get your team to be even more efficient.