Could Kanban be the Biggest Timesaver for your Business?

Project management can be a key driving force in you achieving your business goals.

19:52 25 August 2018

When you own or manage a business, one of the things that you need to keep on top of are processes, and how these are managed especially if you don’t have a dedicated operations management team in place. Project management can be a key driving force in you achieving your business goals. It can save time, boost productivity – and have your organisation running much more effectively than before. Kanban can be a great way for you to improve the processes and procedures within your company and make a real difference.

The Importance of Project Management

Project management is essential in any business as it ensures that what is being delivered is correct, and that it is creating a value to your business. As your project progresses, there may be certain risks involved, and certain things within that project may change. When a project is managed effectively, it allows you to clearly identify when this happens, and to react quickly with a well thought through contingency plan. Everything within your business should have a process in place, if it’s not correctly managed – then how do you know what improvements can be made?

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a visualisation workflow tool, that allows you to manage processes and projects effectively without placing too much burden on your team. It is a great collaboration tool, that allows teams to work better together.

Kanban has 3 main principles which are:

• Visualising your workflow, so you can see all tasks in context of one another
• Limiting work overflow, so you can make sure that your staff don’t have too much to do all at the same time. It will stop team members committing to too much work all at the same time
• Better prioritization, so when a specific task is completed, the next thing on your priority list will then come into play
  
  

How to Implement Kanban in your Business

There are lots of Kanban software solutions that are can be easily integrated within our workforce. You can do this by completing the following:

Breaking down the workflow of the particular project from its conception to its end point in simple, clear steps. There should be a column created for each of those steps, and within that outline all of the tasks associated with that step. You can colour co-ordinate your Kanban board to correlate to different kinds of work. You can then have each task marked off as complete, and then move on to the next part of the project. The more detailed you are, the better this will work.

You should then place work in progress limits to each of these elements. There is a maximum capacity in terms of any task that is completed, and you should impose these limits straight away. This will eliminate waste, and make sure your team or certain departments aren’t overworked.

Kanban works on a pull system instead of a push system. This means that there could be friction amongst different departments if one seems to be outperforming one another. Using a pull system means that the team who are getting through their workload more effectively or efficiently, will only begin more work when the other team is also ready. This should reduce any issues within your team.

You should also look to constantly improve by using Kanban. If you have split out your tasks in a way that everything is easy to see, you should be able to quickly assess whether or not there are any bottlenecks within the process, or if there is one team that seems to be worked a little harder than another. By being able to see this in black and white on your computer screen, you should be regularly monitoring this and making any necessary changes. This will save you lots of time in the long run.

Other Advantages of Kanban

Kanban software can also improve the wellbeing of your staff. Stress in the workplace can be a cause lots of additional problems, not only for the team but the organisation as a whole. One of the main factors of this, is poor project management. By using Kanban, your employees will see that you are making a concentrated effort to manage your projects and resources effectively – and the more smoothly things run – the happier they will be.

Project management is a difficult one to get to grips with, and we are lucky that these days there are all kinds of software’s available to help make this easier. Effective project management doesn’t only result in a more product workforce, but a much more productive one.