The Kanban Daily Standups

Daily standup meetings are a critical part of agile methodology. Daily meeting practices empower agile teams to share project-related updates, identify challenges, overcome problems, and combine efforts to meet a common sprint goal. 

The idea behind daily meetings is to unify your team and discuss project processes and the best approaches to completing all active items and current tasks on a daily schedule. Though there are many ways to run internal meetings, the agile project management approach to standups gives the best results.

The Kanban meeting is a unique day status meeting format that can help an in-house or remote team consider different approaches to completing current tasks reliably in a short but constructive discussion. Let’s discuss everything you should know about this agile approach to help you run more effective daily standups.

What is a kanban daily stand-up?

The Kanban daily standup meeting is a type of agile meeting that involves visualizing current project progress, including completed, upcoming, and delayed tasks, using a digital task board set in kanban view. This creative approach to standups helps you address previous events, upcoming tasks, and problematic items by answering the three daily scrum meeting questions.

Benefits of implementing a kanban daily standup

A Kanban stand up meeting is a 15 minute daily meeting that helps your software development team achieve continuous improvement through quick discussions. These 15-minute group discussions involve your scrum master, Kanban team, project managers, and product owners. 

Each participant in a daily Kanban stand up meeting shares their past activity, daily tasks routine, and potential challenges with other attendees. Though a daily Kanban stand up isn’t your average tactical meeting, it can point your entire team in the right direction by solving problems and presenting the best agile product development options for moving forward.

An effective daily Kanban stand up meeting is vital to planning upcoming projects, handling upcoming assignments, and investing mutual efforts to tackle challenges without disturbing the team dynamic. 

No matter what the prepared agenda is – an effective daily stand up meeting helps you synchronize your team members, align individual and common goals, optimize workflows, improve daily processes, and provide unified transparency in communication.

How do daily kanban stand-ups work?

Kanban meetings work like regular standups with a slight difference. While a regular scrum stand up focuses on your team, the Kanban approach revolves around your backlog of tasks. Each attendee shares a status update during the meeting time and presents a fresh idea on completing a specific agenda item on their visual board.

The goal of Kanban standups isn’t to share some vague formulation of solutions and problems but to harness individual contributions to building a more solid agenda. Since each common team meeting involves a time limit, all participants must work toward a broader goal. 

That’s why daily standups are everything but a waste of time. On the contrary, they can reduce the time spent on a single task. Kanban meetings involve gathering your team around a specific task board. The project manager and the team discuss the tasks at hand to identify problems. 

The meeting leader focuses the meeting on the Kanban board, which can also be a virtual meeting tool (async standup tool for the distributed workforce). Each task or problem is placed in the appropriate column. The team moves from right to left and from top to bottom to discuss the best way forward. 

The tasks that are nearest to completion go to the far-right column. The meeting leader and the participants identify potential issues that prevent them from accomplishing specific tasks. Once the team categorizes tasks into completed, delayed, and blocked sections, everyone invests an effort to move their assignments to the next column.

How to conduct an effective kanban daily standup

Kanban is a popular type of meeting in project management and agile product development because it’s an effective online standup tool that helps teams visualize projects, track progress, and deliver timely results. 

Here are a few daily standup tips to help you ensure your team stays productive, engaged, and aligned in-house and in a virtual environment:

Select the right kanban-like project management tool

If you’re running virtual Kanban meetings, you need a safe, secure, and reliable cloud-based standup tool with screen sharing, video conferencing, real-time note-taking, and audio/video capturing features. Consider daily standup tools like Ayanza, Asana, Jira, or Trello.

Set a clear time limit and ensure your team honors it

Daily standups, scrum, or Kanban, shouldn’t last more than 15 minutes. These meetings aren’t detailed issues discussions but quick recaps of what’s done, what’s next, and what requires immediate attention. Make sure everyone on your team understands this.

Create a solid meeting agenda

An effective meeting revolves around an agenda. Kanban standups should be based on the three main questions that aim to check previous team activity, ongoing tasks, and potential blockers. 

Encourage feedback and participation

You can’t have an effective Kanban standup if your team isn’t willing to share and participate. Invite participants to speak their minds, share ideas, identify challenges, and work together toward a common goal. 

Include a call to action follow-up

Follow up with respective CTAs to ensure everyone is on the same page about what they must do. Document key takeaways, assign tasks according to respective roles, and set time frames for each action item on the board.

Discover kanban daily standups in Ayanza

Ayanza is an AI project management platform that offers advanced features and streamlined workflows to agile and software development teams. The platform provides separate channels where users can streamline daily tasks and improve collaboration with private conversation groups, AI note taker, built-chat editors, AI-enabled brainstorming, and direct messaging. 

Ayanza enables you to boost your daily stand-ups by offering interactive real-time Kanban boards and templates to streamline your meeting activities and save time, effort, and resources in the process. 

In addition to communication channels and collaborative virtual workspaces, Ayanza also offers the intuitiveness of an AI-powered writer, a team wiki-like knowledge base, note-taking, an AI chatbot with team chat capabilities, and a fully customizable daily standup template gallery. 

Armed with these immense capabilities,  you can experiment with different templates, agendas, and meeting questions to bring all your meeting needs to one place. 

The Ayanza Kanban daily standup is a virtual collaborative workspace where you can tap into cross-team collaboration, add/remove active items, manage all tasks from one Kanban board, share notes with your team members, track progress, and more.

FAQ

How can kanban boards improve the efficiency of daily standups?

Kanban boards make daily standups more effective by shifting the meeting focus from people to tasks and the time their completion requires. 

Instead of discussing the problems team members meet, the Kanban meeting focuses on reducing the time all tasks on the board require for completion. 

Each participant moves around the board while discussing blockers and the best ways to remove them.

Are there any tools available to facilitate kanban daily standups?

Agile, scrum, and all other business teams that practice daily standups can look into solutions like Ayanza, Trello, Asana, Jira, Monday, Wrike, Teamhood, Swift Kanban, Miro, and Eylean Board.

How do I run a kanban daily standup in Ayanza? 

Ayanza allows you to run daily standups by displaying your daily tasks and action items in multiple views, such as Kanban boards, galleries, and tables. You get a unified overview of all team members, tasks, projects, and goals that you can share or store in an internal wiki-like knowledge base. 

Ayanza will structure your database hierarchically and lend you the power of AI to make project-relevant content always accessible, available, and searchable. Move tasks to the next column as they near completion with a simple click-and-drag option to never lose sight of your progress.

Is the kanban daily standup mandatory for all team members?

Who will participate in your Kanban daily standups depends on the size of your team and organization. Typically, these meetings gather project managers, scrum masters, developer teams, and product owners. 

However, this is subject to change as different companies have different meeting needs. In smaller teams, business owners can also attend daily standups, though their presence mostly isn’t mandatory. 

What should team members bring or prepare for the Kanban daily standup?

Since these meetings last only 15 minutes, your team should leave mobile devices behind to focus on the action items on the board. Each meeting participant should think about the things they want to say. 

Since Kanban standups focus on the tasks and the time they require, your attendees should shape their thoughts around the meeting agenda to quickly identify problems, present potential solutions, and move delayed or blocked tasks near completion.

How can team members benefit from participating in the kanban daily standup?

The Kanban daily standups help team members identify and resolve issues as early as possible. The ability to remove obstacles before they interfere with daily workflows can save time, effort, and resources and ensure timely product delivery.