A kanban board is one of the tools that can be used to implement kanban to manage work at a personal or organizational level.
Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Cards are moved from left to right to show progress and to help coordinate teams performing the work. A kanban board may be divided into horizontal "swimlanes" representing different kinds of work or different teams performing the work.
Kanban boards can be used for knowledge work or manufacturing processes.
Simple boards have columns for "waiting", "in progress", and "completed" or "to-do", "doing", and "done". Complex kanban boards can be created that subdivide "in progress" work into multiple columns to visualise the flow of work across a whole value stream map.
According to the Project Management Institute, a kanban board is a "visualization tool that shows work in progress to help identify bottlenecks and overcommitments, thereby allowing the team to optimize the workflow."
Kanban can be used to organize many areas of an organization and can be designed accordingly. The simplest kanban board consists of three columns: "to-do", "doing" and "done", though some additional detail such as WiP limits are needed to fully support the Kanban Method. Business functions that use kanban boards include:
Kanban board for software development team. A popular example of a kanban board for agile or lean software development consists of: Backlog, Ready, Coding, Testing, Approval, and Done columns. It is also a common practice to name columns in a different way, for example: Next, In Development, Done, Customer Acceptance, Live.
Kanban for marketing teams
Kanban for HR teams
Personal task management or "personal kanban"
Kanban for accounting teams. Usually consists of columns: new items, ready for distribution, in progress, and completed.
Asana, with boards
Azure DevOps Server, an integrated ALM-platform for managing work in and across multiple teams.