How to Feed KanBo with Your Daily Work? – Understanding KanBo Structure

A large volume of work is often scattered across numerous channels and silos such as emails, spreadsheets, and personal to-dos.

Every individual and team has their own unique method of organizing themselves. It is their way to manage the overall work and stay updated about the progress. However, the major challenge is that there isn’t a single source or point of truth – that one central location where you can look to find the required information and updates.

Just think about it. If you have to answer the following questions right now, you will either need to talk to different people in your team or resort to different communication channels to collect updates.

• What’s the current status of Project A?
• Who is working on what aspect of Project A?
• Who’s on schedule and who isn’t?
• What’s the expected date of completion?
• Are there any challenges or dependencies stemming the flow of progress?

Generally, organizations don’t have that single source of truth where managers and leaders can find answers to all of such questions. KanBo provides you with a way to create a working space that’s focused on visibility, transparency, and collaboration. That makes it convenient for everyone on the team to find, add, and report on work.

Understanding the Work Management Structure in KanBo

Prior to the implementation of KanBo as your organization’s primary work and project management tool, it is crucial that you understand the fundamentals of its structure. This will enable all stakeholders including managers, leaders, and team members to realize the scope of their respective roles and how they can use and interact with different structural components of KanBo software to maximize their productivity.

Board Collections

As the name suggests, board collections are groups of boards that enable users within an organization to consolidate all the relevant information in one place that’s required to complete work and accomplish a variety of tasks. Board collections also allow managers, team leaders, and other members to create a central hub of information that’s relevant to their field of work or department. For instance, marketing managers can have their own board collections related to advertising campaigns and other initiatives.

With board collections, organizations always have quick and easy access to the information they are looking for. These also help in terms of sorting and categorizing information based on a multitude of factors.

Board Groups

Within board collections, you have board groups that allow users to further sub-categorize their information for quick and easy searchability. For example, there could be a board collection named “Marketing” which could contain different board groups depending on different types of marketing and advertising such as “Social Media Marketing”, “Print”, “PPC”, and more.

Since organizations have to manage and categorize a lot of information on a daily basis, board groups provide a way to structure it for increased efficiency and convenience.

Boards

Every board group can contain multiple boards dedicated to certain teams or projects. This allows managers as well as team members to structure and manage large volumes of data in a coherent and well-organized manner. It should be kept in mind that boards are not exclusive to a certain board group or board collection and each individual board can be a part of different groups and collections based on its relevance. For instance, a board created specifically for a PPC campaign can be featured in both marketing and sales board groups as each team needs the information at their fingertips to be effective.

A board acts as a central point of information for team members, managers, leaders, and other stakeholders. Each board features a wide range of elements with each element providing a useful bit of information. Some of the key components include the following:

• Members

On the top, there’s a horizontal list of profile picture thumbnails that let you know about the people who are a part of the project or team. This feature also shows you who is currently available and you can click on their thumbnail to start a conversation.

• Lists

One of the most essential components of a KanBo board is lists which are basically vertical catalogs that are categorized depending on the nature of the information they contain. For example, if you have created a project management board, the lists can include Project Information, Open Questions, To-Do, Doing, Done, and more. You have the option to create new lists for each task and ensure that every team member stays updated.

• Cards

Apart from the lists, cards are the second most essential element of a KanBo board. Each list can have multiple cards containing required information about a certain aspect of the project. For example, in a vacancy management board, there could be a list of candidates with each candidate having their own card containing all the relevant information such as experience and qualification. Cards enable organizations to manage specific information while staying within the KanBo structure.

• Filters

These are basically different types of filters that you can select to see the required information from different perspectives. This allows managers and team leaders to have a bird’s eye view of the entire project and team’s progress.

Lists

As briefly mentioned above, lists are catalogs that categorize information related to projects and tasks through cards. They take most of the screen real estate when you open a board and allow you to keep an eye on the overall progress of a certain team. Managers can use lists to view what each team member is up to while team members can also use the lists to keep their peers updated. Lists ensure a high level of visibility and transparency of information across multiple organizational teams enabling employees to be more productive and efficient.

Cards

This is the most basic level of KanBo’s structure that enables organizations to organize and manage information on a micro-level. Cards contain specific information including minor details of a particular project or task. This helps team members to have access to the required information at all times while ensuring their peers and managers stay informed. The information in the cards can be updated in real-time so everyone on the team can plan their next step.

Examples of Board Collections

Departments	Clients	Countries	Teams
Marketing	Microsoft	United States	Server
IT	Amazon	Germany	Delivery
Sales	Google	Poland	NBA
Engineering	Apple	United Kingdom	Real Madrid
Support	Facebook	Spain

KanBo structure has been specifically designed to be agile and flexible. The presence of board collections, groups, and boards themselves allow organizations to organize, categorize, and manage information and projects ensuring compliance with their internal organizational structure. KanBo isn’t rigid and doesn’t force you to adhere to specific rules. Instead, it provides you with versatile basic components that you can use to build a management structure that aligns with your organizational needs.

How Organizations Can Leverage KanBo Structure for Enhanced Productivity

The structure of KanBo isn’t just designed for simplicity and user-friendliness but to provide complete support for agile functionality as well. When you are searching for a management tool that allows you to organize and manage large volumes of information in a well-structured manner while staying within the constraints of your organizational work ethics and guidelines, KanBo delivers the versatility you expect.

Reimagined Focus on Decentralized Management

Centralized organizations can be defined as the ones that follow a hierarchical decision-making structure where all decisions and processes are managed strictly at the top or the executive level. In this type of system, employees usually don’t have any say or their opinions are not taken into consideration. This results in a rigid and one-dimensional management structure which can have a negative impact on productivity and operational efficiency.

That’s why the KanBo structure facilitates a decentralized organizational structure that is far more flexible and open to change depending on the evolving requirements and objectives of an organization.

Effective Work Management

Work management is usually defined as a collection or group of software products and services that build a specific workflow structure for quick and seamless movement of information across different departments as well as to the interaction of business processes and human worker processes that generate the information. KanBo structure allows organizations to develop workflows that contain little to no redundancies, bottlenecks, and dependencies. This enables teams to be more productive while eliminating any potential waste of time and financial resources.

Built-In Transparency and Information Visibility

One of the most essential features of the KanBo structure is that it keeps information at the forefront of organizational priorities. When all the relevant information is visible and accessible to the relevant stakeholders including team leaders and members, there is zero friction and communication gap which often leads to loss of productivity, lack of understanding of shared objectives, and ultimately organizational revenue. KanBo structure facilitates organizations to make quick and easy accessibility to the right information the core of their success.

Conclusion

KanBo isn’t just another management tool that forces organizations to work within its framework. Instead, it is an agile and versatile collection of fundamental building blocks that organizations can use and leverage in their own way to build flexible workflows and information structures. With KanBo, you can ensure that the right information is always accessible to the right people at the right time without having to compromise on compliance and other organizational regulations.