Kanban Examples: 8 Kanban Board Examples Beyond Software

Kanban examples usually show a software team with To Do, Doing and Done. A board can model any process that has steps, and most processes do. This article gives eight kanban board examples from outside software, each with its stages, sample cards and WIP limits, plus a personal kanban board, kanban card examples and a method for designing your own board.

If you are new to the method, start with what is a kanban board.

What good kanban examples have

The examples below follow the same three rules:

• One kind of card per board. A card is one vendor, one article or one candidate. A board that mixes vendors and tasks is hard to read.
• Stages describe a state, not an action. “Quoted” tells you where a card is. “Get quote” tells you what to do, which is a task inside the stage.
• A limit on the busy stages. A WIP limit caps the stage where work tends to pile up. The first stage, such as Ideas, and the last stage, such as Done, usually have no limit.

Personal kanban board example

Personal kanban is kanban for your own work. Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry described it in their 2011 book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life. The method has two rules: visualize your work, and limit your work in progress.

A personal kanban board can be this small:

• Stages: Backlog, Ready, Doing, Done.
• Sample cards: “Renew passport”, “Book dentist appointment”, “Draft Q4 budget”, “Call the landlord about the leak”.
• WIP limits: 3 in Doing, 5 in Ready.

The Ready stage holds what you have chosen for this week, so the Backlog can stay long without crowding your view. The limit of three in Doing is the part that changes behavior. When you want to start a fourth thing, you first finish or drop one of the three.

Kanban board examples outside software

1. Event planning

• Stages: Ideas, Quoted, Booked, Paid, Confirmed.
• Cards: one vendor per card, such as “Venue: riverside hall”, “Catering”, “Photographer”, “Sound system”.
• WIP limit: 4 in Quoted.

Stages follow commitments instead of tasks. The limit on Quoted stops you collecting quotes from ten caterers before deciding on one.

2. Podcast production

• Stages: Ideas, Guest booked, Recorded, Editing, Published.
• Cards: one episode per card, such as “Ep. 42: interview with a beekeeper”.
• WIP limits: 2 in Editing, 3 in Guest booked.
• Labels: one per series or season.

Editing gets the tightest limit because each episode needs hours of work there. If two episodes wait in Editing, the team stops recording until one is published.

3. Hiring pipeline

• Stages: Applied, Screened, Interview, Offer, Hired, Declined.
• Cards: one candidate per card, with the role as a label.
• WIP limit: 5 in Interview.

This board has two end stages, Hired and Declined, the same way a sales board ends in Won and Lost. The Interview limit protects the interviewers’ calendars.

4. Home renovation

• Stages: Planning, Waiting on materials, In progress, Punch list, Finished.
• Cards: one job per card, such as “Retile bathroom floor”, “Replace kitchen tap”, “Paint hallway”.
• WIP limit: 2 in In progress.

A Waiting on materials stage makes delays visible. Without it, a stalled job looks like a job in progress.

5. Language learning

• Stages: To learn, Practicing, Used in conversation, Known.
• Cards: one word or phrase per card.
• WIP limit: 10 in Practicing.

The limit stops you adding twenty new words before you have used the last ten in a real conversation.

6. Coaching or teaching a skill

• Stages: Introduced, Practicing, Consistent, Ready to perform.
• Cards: one technique per card, on one board per student.
• WIP limit: 3 in Practicing.

The student sees progress across the board, and the coach sees which techniques need the next session.

7. Publications with a buffer stage

A training deck published on digital.gov, the US government’s site for digital teams, shows a board for written publications:

• Stages: Submitted, Outline, Draft, Ready for Graphics, Graphics, Approval, Done.

The Ready for Graphics stage is a buffer. It holds finished drafts that wait for the designer, so the wait is visible instead of hidden inside Draft. In the deck’s example, five cards sit in Ready for Graphics while the Graphics, Approval and Done stages are empty.

8. Processing agreements in government

The same deck describes the 18F Agreements team at the US General Services Administration, which processes agreements, not software. In 2016 the team was “drowning in work”, and its operations staff tried kanban to bring some order to it. The deck reports these results:

• Average processing time fell from 65 days to 37.5 days.
• Agreements in process fell from 49 to 20.

The team’s lesson, in the deck’s words, was that “Decreased amount of work leads to increased quality of work.”

Kanban card examples

A kanban card stands for one piece of work. Toyota’s original kanban, according to the company’s 75-year history, carried three things: the product name, the product number and the quantity. A modern card is the same idea with a few more fields.

These kanban card examples show the difference between a card that works and one that does not:

Most cards also show an owner, a due date when there is a real deadline, and one or two labels for the type of work. Keep long notes in the card’s description or a linked document, not in the title.

A worked example: one card on the event board

Here is how one card moves across the event planning board from example 1.

1. You add “Photographer” to Ideas with three names in the description.
2. You request quotes and move the card to Quoted. Quoted now holds three cards, under its limit of four.
3. Two quotes arrive. You pick one, book the date and move the card to Booked.
4. You pay the deposit and move the card to Paid, then add the balance due date to the card.
5. A week before the event, the photographer confirms the schedule, and the card moves to Confirmed.

At any point, the board answers “what is still open?” without a separate list. If Paid holds cards for weeks, payments are the problem, not bookings.

Common mistakes with kanban board examples

• Copying stages without checking them. An example board is a starting point. If your work has a step the example lacks, add it.
• Mixing card types. Tasks and vendors on one board make the stages mean two different things.
• Too many stages. Ten stages for a personal board means most of them sit empty.
• No limit anywhere. Without a WIP limit, the board shows the pile but does nothing to shrink it.

How to design your own board

1. Pick one kind of card. Decide what a single card stands for: a student, a vendor, an article.
2. Walk one real card from start to finish. Write down every state it passes through.
3. Merge states that need the same action. If two states both mean “waiting for me”, they are one stage.
4. Name stages for what is true. “Quoted” is clearer than “Get quote”.
5. Add a waiting stage where work stalls. Waiting on client, Waiting on materials and Ready for review make delays visible.
6. Set a limit on the busiest stage. Start near the number of people who work in that stage.
7. Test with real cards. Add ten cards, move them for a week, then adjust.

Before you share the board, check that it has between three and seven stages, that each stage has a clear entry condition, and that someone else could read it without your help.

Building these examples in KanbanWP

KanbanWP is a free WordPress plugin for kanban boards. A board made with the Create a board form starts from one of five kanban board templates. The board screen does not have controls to add or rename stages, so use one of these routes for a board with your own stages:

• CSV import. Upload a CSV with a stage column. The import always creates a new board. It adds each stage name the first time a row uses it, so list your first cards in stage order. See exporting and importing.
• REST API. Create, rename and reorder stages through the REST API.
• Duplicate a board. Once a board has the stages you want, duplicate it for each new project.

Inside a board you can add labels for types such as series or roles, and custom fields for details such as a vendor’s quote. The My Tasks view shows only the tasks assigned to you on a board, which suits a personal kanban board on a shared site.

Two more articles go deeper. The benefits of kanban covers what kanban gives a team and where it falls short. What isn’t on the board covers the work that never gets a card.