Streamlining Your Organization’s Workflow through KanBo Cards

The flow or direction of work is quite essential in terms of accomplishing any task, especially if it involves multiple teams, steps, and phases. 

Without adequate workflow management, it is much easier for your team members to lose focus and point fingers when it comes to accountability and answering questions. In these taxing times when businesses are already struggling with managing and streamlining their work across remote teams, it has become pivotal for them to identify and implement effective workflow management solutions.

When every employee in the organization knows how to approach a new task or project, it gives them the clarity to work towards the shared goal instead of wasting time and resources to figure out different aspects of the project. Apart from that, well-defined and elaborate workflows help organizations become more transparent enabling team members to coordinate and collaborate in a highly productive manner. With information about a task and its progress is easily accessible for everyone including managers, it becomes much more convenient for all stakeholders to monitor progress and stay ahead of the curve.

KanBo enables organizations to build and deploy effective workflows through KanBo Cards. They act as a central hub of all the relevant information allowing everyone involved to identify where they stand and how they need to move forward in order to complete a certain task or a project.

When to Create a KanBo Card

KanBo Card is fundamentally a mini-platform within the software that enables managers, team members, and every person involved to make their contributions through a single central hub. This ensures that all the relevant information about the task or project including its start and due dates, to-do list, documents, dependencies, and other data can be accessed quickly and easily. This makes the job much easier for those who are responsible for different tasks.

With KanBo Cards, organizations, teams, and departments can manage and organize complex work by defining streamlined workflows that enable everyone to contribute without getting distracted or side-tracked. A card can be created in a multitude of circumstances but the most frequent events include the following.

1. When Someone Wants You to Do Something for Them

Whether it is your superior such as a manager or team leader or a work colleague who expects you to perform a certain task, it is a smart idea to organize and manage it by creating a KanBo Card. It is highly recommended to use a card for such scenarios as it allows the person who wants you to do a certain task to explain what they expect from you. Moreover, if you have any concerns or questions, you can always communicate them through the card.

This ensures that all the information related to the task isn’t only available in one place but it’s visible for everyone to see. This fosters an environment of transparency and trust where you don’t only understand your responsibilities but your manager, as well as work peers, also know how much work you are currently handling. You can use cards to set your priorities and ensure that the most urgent ones are completed within the given time frame.

2. When You Have an Idea or Want to Do Something

Another situation where you would be better off creating a KanBo Card is when you have an idea or want to start working on something new. In today’s fast-paced work environment, what usually happens is that you are never able to take your ideas and initiatives off the ground as there’s always something that you need to do. That’s why many good ideas are either completely forgotten or you fail to act on them because they are just in your head.

Creating a KanBo Card for your new idea or initiative helps you put everything into writing so you can actually visualize it. It is no longer just an idea that’s stuck in your head. Apart from that, creating a card means you fill in all the relevant information about the task such as start and due dates, documents, basic explanation, responsible people, and a to-do list. This basically creates an execution plan which you have to follow through. This way KanBo Cards allow you to accomplish more than you can ever imagine.

3. When You Want Someone to Do Something for You

If you are looking to delegate a certain task or project to your team members, once again it is suggested that you create a KanBo Card. The card will enable you to explain all the details of the task to the concerned individuals. You can also use it to break down work into a to-do list and assign every bit to a particular person. This way you will have a complete plan and execution roadmap in place that will allow you to reduce hurdles, dependencies, and other issues that arise because of the lack of communication.

More importantly, creating a card means that you will enter all the information related to the expected start and delivery date which will enable you to monitor the progress in real-time while providing feedback whenever required. KanBo Card doesn’t just provide you with a way to record information, it empowers you to be more proactive and efficient when it comes to organizing and managing a diverse variety of tasks and projects.

Key Advantages of Using KanBo Cards for Managing Work Flow

Designing and deploying a streamlined workflow is an uphill battle for an overwhelming majority of organizations as they have to take a wide range of factors into consideration. From unique requirements of different departments and teams to diverse management styles, it is not a possibility for them to implement a one-size-fits-all type of solution. Twenty-first-century work management requires businesses to be more adaptive and flexible.

Instead of expecting teams to work according to the limits of deployed workflows, work flows need to be optimized to accommodate the team’s versatile requirements and objectives. This is where KanBo plays a huge role as it doesn’t require organizations to rely on strict and difficult-to-adjust workflows. It actually provides them with basic building blocks which organizations use to design, develop, and then optimize a diverse variety of workflows across a multitude of departments, applications, and unique requirements.

1. Work Management

It is a diverse assortment of software products and services that implements the workflow structure to the stream of information as well as to the interaction of business and human worker processes that generate the information. With KanBo Cards, organizations have the option to identify their unique requirements and develop highly tailored work management processes that allow their teams to be efficient and productive.

2. Enhanced Coordination

With KanBo Cards, all the relevant information and data is in one place which means that it becomes much more convenient for all team members to coordinate and collaborate to ensure they are working towards the shared goal. When employees don’t have to rely on traditional collaboration tools like video meetings, email, and instant messengers, they save a lot of time that is otherwise wasted on catching up and ensuring they stay up to date. That time and resources can now be spent on more productive tasks.

3. Collaborative Innovation

This is a process where multiple team members contribute towards creating and developing new products, services, processes and business solutions through a single source of truth. Instead of trying to find answers and figuring out what they need to do to get to the next phase of the task, everyone can come together to build a workflow where each member remains in the loop in real-time. All they need to do is to visit the relevant KanBo board and card and they will be good to go.

4. Improved Visibility and Transparency

Many tasks and projects get left behind or team members lose focus because all the information they need to move forward isn’t right in front of them. Moreover, it is often quite time-consuming and laborious to gather all the required information and ensure that everyone is on the same page. This is especially true when you are working on complex projects that involve multiple phases and processes. With KanBo Cards, all the information that you will ever need is right there. This creates a unique sense of trust and transparency motivating employees to be efficient and productive.

5. Monitoring Progress Made Easy

When every step and move is being updated on the KanBo Card, you get timely notifications. This means that you never have to send emails or conduct unnecessary meetings to keep track of the overall progress. All managers and team leaders need to do is open the card related to the project and every bit of relevant information will be there. They can also provide feedback in real-time to ensure every team member knows that you are keeping an eye on the progress.

Conclusion

A large number of organizations have to confront a number of challenges when they are dealing with a high volume of work. There are no defined workflows which means team members often lose focus and managers have to conduct frequent meetings and send emails to stay up to date. This doesn’t only halt the overall progress but has a negative impact on productivity which affects the organization’s bottom line.

That’s exactly that problem that KanBo solves by introducing Cards which provide act as a central hub of information and collaborative interaction. Team members can come back to cards to monitor work and collect the information they need to move forward. Managers can use them to provide feedback and keep an eye on the pace of the progress. When everything you need is in one central place, the workflow automatically becomes organized and well-defined fostering a culture of transparency and high efficiency.