A Kanban Board visualizes a team’s entire work process by representing each process step as a column. Items move as cards from left to right through the columns. This visualization makes the current state of work visible to everyone involved and forms the basis for WIP Limits, bottleneck analysis, and process improvement.
A typical board has columns like Backlog, Analysis, Development, Review, and Done. Each column can carry a WIP Limit that caps the number of concurrent items. The strength of the board lies in its adaptability: a support team has different columns than a development team, and the board evolves with the team’s understanding of its own process. Teams often start with three columns and differentiate later, for example by introducing wait columns between active phases to make idle time visible. The board can be physical on a wall or digital in tools like Jira, Trello, or Azure DevOps.
The name Kanban means “signal card” in Japanese and goes back to the Toyota Production System, where physical cards controlled the flow of materials.
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