kanban

Kanban is an Agile framework with a visualised workflow that is especially popular in software development. There are three components of the Kanban methodology—visualizing workflow, setting WIP limits, and meeting cadences.

When used by development teams, Kanban features a large backlog of user stories that need to be addressed. Business owners and stakeholders are responsible for maintaining and prioritizing the backlog religiously, because it is the sole source of work for the team.

When a team member is ready to work on a new story, they pull it from the backlog and into the “In Progress” column on the Kanban board. As the project progresses it moves across the board until it is completed. The team members handling that project should not start on anything else from the backlog until their current project is complete.

Trello is a fast and simple way to make a digital kanban board. The setup involves just a few clicks to create digital lists, which represent the stages of your kanban process, on a board view that your whole team can access and manage.

For example, you might create lists for “Backlog,” “Up Next,” “In Progress,” and “Done!”  Each task is organized as a card, which you move across the lists as they are queued up, worked on, and completed.

The advantages of a digital kanban board like this are the speed to set it up, the ease in sharing it with others, and the ability to asynchronously track an infinite number of conversations and comments as the project progresses. No matter where or when team members check in on the kanban board, they’ll see the most up-to-date status of the project. 

You can even use a Trello kanban workflow for your personal to-dos- you might imagine the example above showing a backlog of tasks you have to do.  If you had a very long list, make an intermediate column called "Sprint" and move all the tasks for the current month into this.

Then move tasks for this week into ToDo.  As you begin each task, move it to Doing.  You could have a column for Done, and of course when the job is complete, move it here, and continue. Each task can have dates and times added to the card.  Each might also be assigned a priority.  Each may also be assigned an estimated completion time.  This board would serve as documentation for each and every job/task completed, indicating when it started, how long it was before it was completed and when.  Comments can also be added to each card.  Is this something you might use?

The Difference with Scrum?