IT Glossary
What is Kanban?
The visual board method: tasks flow across columns — To do, In progress, Done — with a hard cap on how many can be in progress at once.
Of all the ways to organise work, Kanban has the gentlest entrance and one of the deepest lessons. The entrance: a board with columns — minimally To do, In progress, Done — where every task is a card moving left to right; one glance shows who is working on what, what is stuck and what shipped (digital tools like Trello or Jira work, and so does a wall of sticky notes). The deep lesson is the WIP limit: each column holds a maximum number of cards, and when it is full, nothing new starts until something finishes. This is counterintuitive and transformative, because multitasking is the illusion of productivity — started-but-unfinished work is inventory that clogs the system. The limit forces finishing before starting, exposes bottlenecks (the permanently full column is your process choking), and measurably shortens every task's journey from idea to delivered. Born on Toyota's factory floors and adopted by software, the method fits any flow of work in a company: support tickets, production orders, marketing campaigns, hiring pipelines. And in a relationship with a software supplier, a shared Kanban board is transparency in its most concrete form — you watch in real time what your money is being spent on, with no extra status meetings.
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Why it matters for your business
All the work, in plain sight
The board shows at a glance what is in progress, what is stuck and what is shipping — statuses stop being hunted through meetings and email.
Finished beats started
Work-in-progress limits force completion — fewer projects endlessly 'in progress', more actually delivered.
Bottlenecks unmasked
The permanently crowded column shows exactly where the flow chokes — the fix goes there, on evidence rather than impressions.
Frequently asked questions
Kanban or Scrum — which fits our team?
By the nature of the work: continuous flows with shifting priorities — support, maintenance, operations — favour Kanban, which imposes no cycles; product development toward staged goals favours Scrum with its sprints and rituals. Many teams combine them pragmatically; the sin is not the choice but the religion — the method serves the work, never the reverse.
What work-in-progress limit should we start with?
A practical opening rule: the number of people plus one or two per active column, adjusted against reality afterwards. The first weeks will hurt — 'I cannot start anything!' — and that pain is the lesson: the limit exposes blocked work that multitasking used to hide. Resist raising the limit before unblocking the flow.
Does Kanban work outside IT — production, marketing, administration?
That is where it comes from: Toyota invented it for factories, software merely rediscovered it. Any staged work with handovers settles naturally onto a board — orders, campaigns, procurement files, recruitment. The single condition: cards must reflect reality; a board updated from memory on Fridays is theatre, not management.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247