Kanban originally comes from Kanji, which is written in Japanese. These signs stand for Kanban 看板, the first is Kan (看) and means "visual" and the second is Ban (板) and means "card".

Let me tell you a small part of the history of Kanban since it has been very interesting and useful for me.

After the Second World War, the Japanese sought a more effective and efficient production system that could confront the precarious conditions in which they lived. The goal was to avoid unnecessary waste of cost at all times. In the early 1950’s, Toyota started studying a system to manage all materials flows in one assembly production line. He did this through a card system that imitated the operation of an American supermarket: "replenishment provisioning".

Nowadays, Kanban is part of agile methodologies all over the world, and its main objective is to manage how efficiently and satisfactorily the tasks are when they are completed.

If you want to go deeper into the Kanban method, I recommend you to read these books:

• Getting Started with Kanban
  (by Paul Klipp)
• Agile Project Management with Kanban, Developer Best Practices
  (by Eric Brechner)
• Kanban. Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business
  (by David J. Anderson)
  
  

5 reasons you should use Kanban

1. It will increase the productivity of your company. According to the Kanban system, no worker will start a task if he does not get a new Kanban, in other words, a work order is expressed as a task. In this way, everyone will know how much work they have and what needs to be done in every moment of the day.
2. It will also improve the development of projects. By increasing productivity, you will improve the production process. This makes the work done by several teams at the same time to give a higher quality index and it also reduces time to finish the project. We will only do what is right and necessary, without wasting energy.
3. We will show the best workflow. With Kanban, it’s necessary to have a panel that will help us to manage everything, in a visual way. Having the work divided into different sections, we will see everything with a glance, for example: in what state is our management tasks at each moment, we will know how to identify all assigned projects for each department or team, every priority has its deadline…
4. We will also check the workload. Kanban can be applied to multiple tasks and projects, in addition to allowing us to identify if there is an unnecessary workload, which will slow down the process of realization of what is already in progress.
5. It will allow you to change the priorities of tasks. We can always have our management panel updated and change the order of priority of each task. All kind of Flexibility is contemplated in this method.

Guess what? Laycos allows you to implement the Kanban method

It’s made possible through the functionality: Tasks

You can visualize and decide the workflow but also in different areas or departments of your company. From the main board, you can access all your tasks, you can see the work assigned to each person or department, see the priorities, make changes if necessary… As explained in the article Assign, manage and follow up Tasks, you can access the history that originated Each task, from the same panel. Having all the information you need to work organized in one place, it is unquestionable that it will save you and your company a lot of time 😉

Many times, our work environment forces us to be multi-tasking. It is our personal duty not to let ourselves gobble up and learn to focus and try to be more productive. For this purpose there are methodologies such as Kanban, devised decades ago, that worked then and now. With the help of technology like Laycos, we can also go faster and be more efficient.

If you have not yet convinced yourself to apply Kanban with Laycos, I will allow you to quote Peter Drucker, who was considered one of the most important philosophers of 20th-century business administration.

The right structure does not guarantee results, but the wrong structure aborts results and smothers even the best directed efforts.