A kanban board for small teams: a plain beginner’s guide

A kanban board is a set of columns, one for each stage your work goes through, with a card for every job. You move the card right as the job moves on. That’s all it is, and it’s why a kanban board for small teams works better than most of the fancier options: anyone can read it in ten seconds without training.

The name comes from Japanese, where it means something like “signboard”, and the method got famous in Toyota’s factories. You don’t need to know any of that to use one. You need a few columns and a team that agrees to keep it up to date.

Columns that work

Start with three: To do, Doing, Done. Run it like that for two weeks before adding anything.

Then look at where jobs sit and wait. That’s the column you’re missing. For most small teams it’s one of these:

• Waiting (on a supplier, or on a client making up their mind)
• Checking (someone else looks at it before it counts as done)
• Invoiced or Handed over (for work that isn’t finished until it’s paid or signed off)

Add one, maybe two. Four or five columns is plenty for a team of up to about fifteen people. We’d argue that past six, a board stops being something people glance at and becomes something one person maintains.

Name columns after states, not people. A column called “Marek” tells you who has the work but not where it’s got to, and when Marek goes on holiday the whole column freezes.

WIP limits, explained without the jargon

WIP means work in progress, and a WIP limit is a number you write at the top of a column (usually Doing) that says how many cards are allowed in it at once.

Say your limit on Doing is five. There are already five cards there. Someone finishes their current job and wants to start a new one. They can’t, until one of the five moves on. So instead of pulling a fresh card, they help unstick one of the others: chase the supplier, answer the question someone’s been waiting on, check the thing that needs checking.

That sounds like it’d slow a team down. In practice it probably won’t. Most small teams don’t have a starting problem; they have a finishing problem. Everyone has six jobs at 80%, each with a customer who’s been told it’ll be done this week, and on a Wednesday afternoon nobody can say which one to finish first because they all feel equally urgent.

How to pick the number? A decent first guess is the number of people who work from the board, plus a couple. Five people, a limit of six or seven. If the column is always under the limit, lower it. If it’s always full and people are twiddling their thumbs, raise it. Nobody gets it right first time.

Klusko doesn’t enforce WIP limits: the Board view won’t stop you dragging a sixth card into a column marked five, so the limit works by agreement, the same as a whiteboard would. We think that’s fine for a small team. What does help is the Workload view (on the Team plan), which shows each person’s load against the team average, so when one person has nine cards and everyone else has three it’s hard to miss.

What a good card has

A card is a promise that someone will do something. A good one reads like a promise.

• A title that starts with a verb and says what done means: “Send revised quote to Hollis Road”, not “Hollis Road”.
• One owner. Not two, not “the team”.
• A due date, even a rough one.
• A priority, if not everything is equal (it rarely is).
• The details somewhere on the card, not in someone’s head: measurements, the client’s email, a photo of the damage.

In Klusko every one of those has a place on the card. There’s one assignee, a due date and a priority level, with tags and subtasks underneath. Files and photos attach to the card, and anyone can drop a link to it in chat. The tasks page shows what a card looks like.

A card that fails most of those tests is usually a worry someone wrote down, and it’ll sit in To do for a month.

The mistakes we see most

The 20-column board. Someone keen builds a column for every step of the process: Enquiry, Quoted, Quote chased, Accepted, Deposit requested, Deposit paid, Scheduled, then thirteen more after that. It looks thorough. Within a month nobody moves cards past the first few because it takes too many drags, so the board stops matching what’s happening and people go back to asking each other in chat where things have got to. Merge columns until each one is a place where work actually waits.

Cards with no owner. These are the ones that go stale. Everyone can see the card, everyone assumes someone else has it, and it drifts left while the others move right. If a card has no name on it by the end of the day it was created, either give it one or bin it.

Done never gets cleared. After three months the Done column has 200 cards and the board takes a while to scroll. Archive finished cards weekly (Klusko has archive for exactly this, so finished cards get out of the way without being deleted).

Treating To do as a wish list. Ideas are fine, but if To do has 80 cards, it isn’t telling you what’s next. Keep a separate “Someday” project for the ideas, or at least put them at the bottom.

Updating the board once a week. A board that’s only touched at the Monday meeting turns into a weekly report that nobody trusts by Thursday. If moving a card takes longer than the job itself, people won’t do it. Keep it quick and keep it where people already are; for us that meant putting the board and the team chat in the same app.

Kanban board for small teams: three examples

These are hypothetical, but they’re the shapes we’d start with.

A bakery doing wholesale and celebration cakes. Columns: Order in, Deposit paid, In production, Ready for collection, Collected. Cards are orders: “Wedding cake, three tiers of lemon and elderflower, Sat 14 Nov”. The owner is whoever’s decorating, the due date is the collection date, and a tag marks allergen notes. A WIP limit on In production stops the team taking on more cakes for one Saturday than the oven and two decorators can handle. There’s more for food businesses on our hospitality page.

A five-person marketing agency might use Brief, Doing, With client and Done. With client is the one that matters; it’s where work waits for feedback, and a card sitting there for a week is a nudge to chase. Each client gets its own project, or one board uses a tag per client. Guests can be invited to a single project, so a client can see their own board without seeing anyone else’s. See our page for marketing agencies.

A small building firm could run To quote, Booked, On site, Snagging and Invoiced. One card per job, with the address in the title and the drawings attached. Subtasks cover each trade that needs booking. Snagging gets its own column because that’s where jobs stall for weeks, and on a board you can see a card sitting there. Invoiced stays until it’s paid. The construction and trades page has a fuller example.

Starting on Monday

Pick one piece of work the whole team touches and leave the rest for now. Make three columns. Put every open job on a card with a name and a date. Look at it together for five minutes, ideally at the start of your weekly meeting (our weekly team meeting agenda is built around walking a board). Add a fourth column when you notice where things wait.

You can do all of this on a whiteboard with sticky notes, and for a team in one room that’s a perfectly good start. It stops working the first time someone is out on a job and wants to know what’s next, because nobody can read a whiteboard in the office from a van parked outside a house in Harlow. The project management page covers how boards fit with the other Klusko views if you get to that point.

Questions