Kanban is a Japanese word meaning "visual card", and it comes from Toyota's production lines. Its first idea: make the work visible. You draw a board with columns for your real workflow stages, such as To Do, Designing, Building, Reviewing, Done, and each task is a card moving from left to right. At a glance, everyone can see where work is piling up.
The second idea is work-in-progress (WIP) limits: a maximum number of cards allowed in each column. If the Review column has a limit of 3 and already holds 3 cards, nobody pulls in a new one until one leaves. This forces the team to finish work before starting more, and it exposes bottlenecks instead of hiding them. The well-known slogan: "Stop starting, start finishing."
Kanban is a pull system: work isn't pushed onto people; they pull the next card when they have capacity. Performance is tracked with two measures: cycle time, from when work actually starts on a card until it is done, and lead time, from when the request arrives until it is delivered to the customer. Customers feel lead time most.
Unlike Scrum, Kanban needs no fixed-length sprints and no new roles; work flows continuously and is delivered when ready. That makes it a good fit for work that arrives unpredictably with shifting priorities, such as IT support, maintenance, and marketing requests. You can start it on top of your current process and improve gradually.
💡 Key points
- Make work visible on a board that mirrors your real workflow.
- WIP limits push the team to finish before starting and expose bottlenecks.
- It is a pull system, measured by cycle time and lead time.
- Continuous flow without sprints, well suited to unpredictable requests.
🌍 Real-life example
A marketing agency used to start every request the moment it arrived, ending up with 25 half-finished tasks and everyone late. It set up a Kanban board with a limit of 4 cards in Design and 2 in Client Approval. It became clear right away that client approval was the bottleneck, so they assigned someone to chase approvals, and lead time dropped from 12 days to 5.
📖 Key terms
| English | العربية |
|---|---|
| Kanban Board | لوحة كانبان |
| WIP Limit | حد العمل الجاري |
| Pull System | نظام السحب |
| Cycle Time | زمن الدورة |
| Lead Time | زمن التسليم |
| Bottleneck | الاختناق / عنق الزجاجة |