Kanban can be used to organize many areas of an organisation and should be designed accordingly. Dovilė Misevičiūtė, Manager of studies at ISM University of Management and Economics, recently shared a blog on Top 5 Most Innovative Kanban Boards. She describes the Kanban boards as:
The Space Saver:
Sometimes team faces space problem to create a kanban board. Olivier Lafontan, Agile, Kanban and Lean Startup Coach at AXA, offers a solution for this. He proposes to turn the board into a square. Instead of moving tasks the traditional way from the left to the right column, he suggests moving them clockwise.
The Arrow Kanban board:
Tomas Rybing, Director of project management at Aptilo Networks, in his latest blog shared the concept of a customized kanban board named ‘Arrow’. The Arrow is based on the priority pyramids approach. Arrow is a visualization of the backlog combined with the kanban board that visualizes the work process. More information is available on InfoQ on the Arrow kanban board.
The HR Web:
Kanban can also be used in HR department. Jennifer Vaaler ,Small Business Efficiency Expert at Transpire Life, shares an HR web kanban board. This Kanban board is turned into a web-like shape, where each part of the web represents a different job position and each lane represents a step in the hiring process. The potential candidates are the task cards and are moved from the initial contact to a possible job offer or dropped off as they prove to be insufficient along the way.
The Notebook:
This kanban board is useful for personal kanban users. Patty, founder of Layers of Love for chemotherapy patients, shares her experiment of creating a notebook for whole board.
She suggests moving the whole board into your notebook, making it easily transportable and always by your side. She still uses sticky notes and draws up different boards for different activities if needed. There is really no need to get stuck with the idea of a board, when making it mobile proves to be much more effective.
The Mighty Lego:
This kanban board is an experiment of a team at Drew. The board is inspired by Lego. The board is fairly simple – divided into three simple areas of to do, doing and done. Each task card holds the number of the job, the client name and a short description. The task assignment is done via color coded blocks, whose number is limited based on each members availability.