Emma Morris and Katie Wall who work in our Continuous Improvement (CI) service have recently set up a team ‘Kanban’ board and in the spirit of CI wanted to share this with us.

At any one time, the CI Service usually has between 30 and 40 ‘active’ pieces of work on the go and in order to track our workload effectively we implemented a Kanban Board.

We have a review meeting every Friday morning to update the Kanban board and plan our workloads and then we have a supporting SharePoint list where we keep more detailed information about each piece of work so that we can produce stats on how much new work is coming in and what types of work we are being asked to do.

It is a simple but highly effective technique initially used by the Toyota Motor Industry where production line workers used cards to signal the progression of steps in their manufacturing process. This highly visual tool allowed teams to see at a glance what work needed to be done and when.
You can read more about the history of Kanban here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

This technique is so flexible it can be adapted and applied to any kind of work process, and all you need is a blank space, some post-it notes and a bit of brain power, it really is that easy!

If you want some help with setting up your own Kanban board, feel free to get in touch with us and we would be more than happy to help.