Kanban

Kanban is a work management method that makes every task visible on a board and limits how much work is in progress at once. Columns represent stages such as Backlog, In Progress, Review, and Done, and each card moves left to right as the work advances. The method came from Toyota's manufacturing system, where cards signalled that the next station was ready to pull more work. Software teams kept that pull principle: instead of assigning a batch of tasks up front, a person takes the next card only when they have capacity. Work-in-progress limits are the part teams most often skip, yet they are what makes the board useful, because a column that keeps filling up reveals the real bottleneck. Trello popularised the simple board, Jira and Linear add workflow rules and cycle-time metrics, and GitHub Projects offers the same view over issues. Kanban differs from Scrum in having no fixed-length sprints and no required ceremonies, so it suits support and operations work with unpredictable arrival rates. Used without WIP limits, a board becomes a decorative to-do list that hides queueing rather than exposing it.