The Kanban Board: Visual Task Management

Visibility is the cure for bottlenecks

Kanban was invented at Toyota in the 1940s. The insight: make work visible and bottlenecks become impossible to ignore. The same principle applies to software projects, marketing campaigns, and hiring pipelines.

Reading the Proactiq Kanban board

Open any project and click the Kanban view. Tasks are arranged in columns by status:

• Backlog — Queued but not started. Prioritise this list weekly.
• Todo — Next up. These should be the things being actively worked on in the next 48 hours.
• In Progress — Currently being worked on. If someone has 5 cards here, they're either context-switching too much or the tasks aren't broken down small enough.
• In Review — Done by the assignee, needs someone else to verify
• Done — Completed and accepted

The WIP limit principle

Limit "In Progress" to 2-3 tasks per person. The research is clear: humans are not good at multitasking. Finishing one thing and starting the next is faster than working on five things simultaneously.

The daily standup in Proactiq

Use the kanban board as your standup visual. Each person answers: "What did I finish yesterday? What am I doing today? What's blocking me?" Cards move in real time. The board tells the story without anyone having to write a report.