As a project manager, you probably spend a lot of your time trying to get a clear picture of the current status of your projects. Between spreadsheets, email, and meetings, you’re constantly deciphering and relaying back information to various stakeholders and team members. Kanban project management is a highly visual method that gives project managers the visibility you need to deliver work on time, on budget, and on value.
What is Kanban Project Management?
Kanban project management helps you harness the power of visual information by using sticky notes on a whiteboard to create a “picture” of your work. Seeing how your work flows within your unique process lets you not only communicate status but also give and receive context for the work. Many teams like to get started with Kanban by practicing on a physical whiteboard, but most teams and organizations graduate to Kanban project management software to enable portfolio-level visibility.
Kanban project management software can be used at the team, project, and portfolio levels, giving everybody the insights they need to stay in the know and deliver faster. Keep reading to learn more about Kanban project management, and how Kanban can give you the visibility you need to control the chaos.
Benefits of Kanban for Project Managers
Visibility into Real-Time Status Information
When used across teams, Kanban empowers project managers with real-time status information. Instead of spending time trying to synthesize information from countless sources, you can see everything you need to manage initiatives in one place, in real-time, with no additional manual effort on your part.
Capacity to Add More Value
In Planview AgilePlace, you can design your Kanban boards to visually notify you when there is a bottleneck or blocker in your process, or if someone on your team is overburdened. You can also actively constrain the amount of work that is being done at any given time, to reduce context switching and improve the speed of value delivery.
For project managers, this kind of visibility arms you with the ability to keep work moving, and to immediately jump in if you see any issues, instead of waiting for someone to report issues to you.
In doing so, you can provide more value to your teams, by removing anything blocking the flow of progress in the initiatives you manage.
Data Collection for Process Improvement
Management guru Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” By using a Kanban project management tool like Planview AgilePlace, you automatically collect data about how you work that allows you to better manage your processes.
This allows you to practice the Kanban concept of continuous improvement — because with shared visibility into how work gets done, you and your teams can work together to improve processes for maximum value delivery.
Better Communication with Stakeholders
Shared visibility also helps you communicate better with key stakeholders. Using a Kanban project management tool like Planview AgilePlace allows project managers to provide executives and other stakeholders with a bird’s-eye view of strategic initiatives. With a clearer understanding of how work flows through the organization, stakeholders can make smarter, more sustainable strategic decisions on behalf of the company.
Kanban for Project Managers: Learn More
Project management is tough, but Kanban can help. To learn more about how Kanban project management tools can enable project managers to communicate better with teams and stakeholders, use data to drive decision making, and become catalysts for process improvement within your organization, we recommend the following resources:
