Top 4 Keys to Having a Well Organized Successful Kanban Board for Your Remote Team

The kanban philosophy is all about streamlining management, optimizing workflows, and visualizing tasks — and the tool at the center of this objective is the titular kanban board. This board can be presented in either a digital or physical format, and it allows stakeholders to visualize the tasks associated with a project as well as the people responsible for those tasks. Because of its straightforward format, it’s particularly well-suited to the online office environment, and it can even be presented in meetings in front of a Zoom virtual office background. Learn the top four tips to make sure that your kanban board is well-organized and ready to be presented in your next remote team meeting.

Map Out the Value Stream

1. Designate task owners. The value stream of your kanban board is the most important representation of its function. As you allocate task owners, you can set up a stream for those tasks to flow through. This makes it easy to see what needs the most work, where most of your efforts are focused, and what tasks are being neglected. In short, the value stream helps to ensure that your project stays aligned to its values, thus making it an integral component of any team meeting presentation that features a kanban board.

2. Identify any bottlenecks. Sometimes, a project gets slowed down due to a disproportionate focus on a single task or a lack of resources allotted to another. When this happens, a bottleneck may emerge, but it’s often difficult to see when you’re in the middle of a project. Visualizing your tasks with a value stream is the best way to identify these problem spots. If you’re on a virtual team meeting with free Zoom backgrounds office, you can share your screen with other meeting attendees and discuss the value stream and its bottlenecks to find a solution.

Align in Daily Standups

3. Make time for collaboration. When you’re working on a kanban board together, it’s important to make time for collaborative moments that help to move the project along. This is the purpose of the daily standup meeting. In addition to dictating tasks and tracking time management goals, a standup meeting allows all team members to touch base, share ideas, and update each other on the progress of individual tasks. This ultimately should minimize the amount of time that tasks require for completion since all team members will be aligned in their goals.

4. Give meaningful updates. The most important part of the daily standup meeting is the sharing of progress updates. As team members give updates on their tasks, the rest of the team should make note of how the update impacts their own task progress. It’s important that all information be productive in light of this goal. If necessary, team members may even be able to break out into pairs to give and receive further information about task progress. If you plan to do this and you’re looking for a way to bypass Zoom virtual office requirements, there are several options available.