5 Reasons Your Startup Should Use Kanban

Sample Kanban Board

5 Reasons Your Startup Should Use Kanban. The Kanban system has been gaining popularity in various industries. Kanban is an agile framework that differs from other agile frameworks in its execution. In kanban, different types of tasks are handled on one board, allowing teams to focus on progress and completion instead of trying to tie roles, tasks, and responsibilities to individuals. Many startups that use kanban say it has allowed them to increase productivity while optimizing resources. Here is why you should be using the kanban method.

Increased Efficiency

The kanban method focuses on getting things done. When using Kanban boards, team members can see the whole workflow as well as any changes that are made to the board. Because of this, kanban can help reduce the amount of time teams take to complete projects.

If you are a tech startup, you will love the efficiency kanban introduces, especially in cases where you need to reduce the amount of work in progress. Because controls like speed and sprints do not exist in kanban, developers can focus and work a lot more efficiently because there is no added pressure to complete tasks.

Using kanban also gives teams the ability to find areas they can improve on. This often involves finding bottlenecks that are slowing things down and streamlining processes that have the biggest impact on product delivery. When these inefficiencies are eliminated, teams can do a lot more with few resources and in a short amount of time.

Teamwork

One main difference between Kanban and other project management systems like scrum is that there is shared ownership and responsibility of a project by the entire team. In kanban, everyone is working off the same board, meaning that everyone owns the whole project at the same time. This collective ownership is especially important for startups and small businesses where all team members should own and take responsibility for projects and their completion.

Kanban also helps ground the team due to the transparent nature of task assignment and completion. This transparency, accountability, and responsibility can be the foundation you build your startup on.

Project Management

Proper project management is at the center of many startups’ success. Proper project management makes it easy and even possible for startups to meet demands and deliver products on time. Kanban lets you come up with the goals you need to achieve and track them to ensure they are being met. By using kanban, workflow stages can be shared and everyone can see the state of the project which helps project managers better coordinate the completion of a project.

Kanban software lets you create customized boards with different work stages including To Do, In Review, Completed, and a lot more, so a project manager always knows the state of each task they have assigned to team members. Startup Should Use Kanban.

When choosing Kanban software, it is important to choose one that makes the creation of these boards, as well as their management and arrangement, as easy as possible. Flexible kanban software from companies like Kanbanize makes it easy to visualize your workflow and track the overall status of all tasks assigned to team members. Kanbanize aims to make project management as easy as possible by providing powerful tools, like their Kanban software, that is not only easy to use, but that is also flexible enough no matter the type of startup you run or the structure of the team you manage.

Flexibility

A major benefit of running a growing startup is the flexibility it affords you. A team can be as flexible as it likes before customers and investors start providing their input. Kanban is great for this because nothing is set permanently. A team can choose what to focus on to ensure the delivery of a product or service as efficiently as possible.

Other project management systems have planned schedules for tasks that include when certain deliverables and metrics should be met. Kanban has none of these, meaning teams and companies can be as flexible as they like, rearranging workflows to ensure maximum efficiency.

Faster, More Frequent Releases

When using other project management tools, it is almost impossible to release product features in the middle of an iteration. This limitation does not exist in kanban because iterations can be released to the users at any time. If an important feature comes up or is required by the users, it can be pushed to the top of the stack, worked on, and released as soon as it is complete.

Users and customers benefit from this because the lead time for the implementation is shorter. The one thing to keep in mind is that teams that use kanban must have automated testing in place if they want to release features this way. When a team does not have proper automated testing in place, it gets a lot harder to release smaller features that are of high quality.

If your team is looking for a project management system, it should consider kanban. In addition to eliminating inefficiencies, the transparency it offers is great for accountability, while its flexibility means the team can adapt and prioritize the features that are in high demand right now.Startup Should Use Kanban

Jennifer Thomas
Jennifer Thomas is the Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Cybers Guards. Prior to that, She was responsible for leading its Cyber Security Practice and Cyber Security Operations Center, which provided managed security services.