"Kanban (pronounced kahn-bahn, Japanese for "a card" or visual sign) is a just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing technique originally developed in the early 1940s by Taiichi Ohno, an engineer at Toyota, to improve supply and inventory efficiency. Kanban, today, is a tool for visualization of teamwork, to help design and manage workflow by capacity, and for continuous improvement of processes.

Kanban is lean production. It has no direct say in development, manufacturing, or management. It does not dictate planning, implementation or deployment. Kanban provides process transparency through visualization, communicating what needs to be done and when, setting the amount of work to match the resources available, and analyzing plans, results, and processes."

Work is organized by project (we call this a Board). Every project is visually displayed on a board made up of cards under the categories of Backlog, To Do, Doing, Done, and Archive. Every card is a task or activity - a step in your business process placed on the board based on its real-time state and priority. Team members move cards from categories of planning (Backlog), to scheduled (To Do), to in-progress work (Doing), to completed (Done), and stored for post-project viewing (archive).

Kanban is not agile per se, but it can be used as an agile tool. Nor is Kanban Scrum, although Scrum can be implemented with Kanban. There are no iterations or Scrum sprints, instead work flows continuously. There are no additional roles just for Kanban. There are no daily meetings unless somebody actually needs one. There should only be enough work to match your capacity and resources. Include estimation, review and retrospectives only as your business process demands it.