How to use a Kanban board for project work: columns and WIP limits

What a Kanban board is

Kanban started as a way to control the flow of parts on a factory line. Knowledge-work teams adopted the idea because it solves the same problem: too much work started at once, and too little finished. The board makes the work visible, and the WIP limit makes the team stop and help each other when a step gets clogged.

A Kanban board has three parts:

• Cards: one card per piece of work, small enough to finish in a few days. Each card has an owner, a short title and, ideally, a due date.
• Columns: the steps a card passes through, from left (not started) to right (done).
• WIP limits: the maximum number of cards allowed in a column at the same time.

Kanban is a pull system. Nobody pushes work onto a person who is full. When someone finishes a card and a slot opens in the next column, they pull the next most important card forward.

Which columns to use

Start with the smallest set that matches how work really moves, then add a column only when a real step is hidden. A good default for project work is:

Column	What it means	Typical WIP limit
Backlog	Ideas and requests not yet agreed	None
Ready	Agreed, clear enough to start, ordered by priority	About one week of work
In progress	Someone is actively working on it	Roughly one to two cards per person
Review	Waiting for a check, approval or client feedback	Small, often 2 to 4
Done	Finished and accepted	None

Write a short definition of done for each column: what must be true before a card may move right. "Review" without a rule becomes a parking lot. If cards often wait on someone outside the team, add a visible "Blocked" marker or column so the wait is not hidden inside "In progress".

How WIP limits work, with a worked example

A WIP limit is a team agreement: when a column is full, nobody pulls a new card into it. Instead, people help clear the column, usually by reviewing, testing or unblocking someone else's card. It feels slower for a day and is faster over a month, because work stops waiting in half-finished piles.

The reason is a simple relationship known as Little's Law: average time in progress = average WIP / average throughput.

Example: a five-person team has 20 cards in progress and finishes about 10 cards a week. Average time per card is 20 / 10 = 2 weeks. If the team agrees a limit of 10 cards in progress and keeps finishing 10 a week, the average falls to 10 / 10 = 1 week. Nothing got faster; work simply waited less. That is why the limit matters more than the board itself.

To pick a first limit, count the cards in progress today, then set the limit a little lower. Review it after two or three weeks: if people sit idle, raise it by one; if cards still pile up in one column, lower it there.

How to set up a Kanban board in six steps

1. Map the real workflow. Ask the team what happens to a request from arrival to delivery. Write the steps, not the ideal process.
2. Create the columns from that map, keeping five or six at most to begin with.
3. Split work into small cards. If a card will take more than a week or two, break it into subtasks or a checklist.
4. Add every live piece of work. A board that shows half the work is worse than none, because people stop trusting it.
5. Set WIP limits on "In progress" and "Review", and write them in the column name, for example "In progress (6)".
6. Hold a short daily board walk. Walk the board from right to left: what can be finished today, what is blocked, who needs help. Then ask whether anything new should be pulled.

Worked example: a website relaunch board

A four-person team is relaunching a company website. On Monday the board looks like this:

Ready	In progress (limit 5)	Review (limit 3)	Done
Pricing page copy	Home page design	About page copy	Site map
Contact form	Blog template	Logo files	Hosting set up
Redirect list	Product page copy	Footer links	Style guide
	Image library
	Analytics tags

Both limited columns are full. A designer finishes the home page design and wants to start the contact form, but Review already holds three cards. The rule says she reviews the about page copy first. That clears a slot, the home page moves to Review, and only then does the contact form enter In progress. The board turned a quiet queue into a visible decision.

Common Kanban board mistakes

• No WIP limits. Without them the board is a to-do list with columns, and nothing changes in how fast work finishes.
• Too many columns. Ten columns hide where work waits. Merge steps that the same person does in one sitting.
• Cards that are too big. A card that sits in progress for a month tells you nothing. Split it.
• Stale cards. If the board does not match reality, people return to email and chat. Update it during the daily walk.
• Using Kanban for date-driven dependency chains. A board shows flow, not sequence. When task B cannot start until task A ends, and the end date is fixed, you also need a timeline or a critical path schedule.

How to do this in Critova

In Critova, a simple project starts as a task board. You can rename the statuses to match your columns, add subtasks, checklists, assignees and due dates, and switch the same tasks between board, list, table and calendar views. Team members move their own cards from the My Work page, which also works on a phone.

Critova does not enforce WIP limits or chart cycle time, so treat the limit as a team rule: put it in the status name, as in the example above, and check it during the board walk. When a project grows dependencies and fixed dates, you can move it up to a timeline with milestones or to full critical path scheduling; see the critical path method guide and the scheduling features. To try a board with sample data, open the live demo.