With studies showing how the visualization of information can counterbalance cognitive overload, more and more project managers are turning to the use of a 60 year old Japanese method called Kanban  to help bring clarity to today’s projects and help team members achieve their goals.

Thanks to the cloud and its ever-present mobile connectivity, Kanban has been updated and is making a digital comeback in digital form.

Visual cards

The Japanese term “Kanban” means visual card. A Kanban system includes a board which has been divided into several columns, one for each project workflow. The most basic boards have three columns – ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Done’. Cards are placed under each category to represent project workflows, moving through the columns as tasks progress.

This provides immediate clarity regarding any project, no matter how complex, as it allows team members to easily absorb large amounts of information and visualise what everyone is working on. In other words, Kanban boards enable smooth team collaboration, boosting team productivity.

Simple yet efficient

Studies carried out in the fields of group psychology and behavioural science show the brain processes images far more easily than it does text. By visualising information, people can counterbalance cognitive overload, which occurs when they receive too much information or too many tasks simultaneously, not being able to process information properly.

Interestingly, while it is now that the Kanban approach is gaining popularity in businesses across the world, it was first developed by Toyota in post-war Japan, when the country sought to revive its industry by improving production levels. Following Toyota’s positive results, Kanban started being recognized as a tool for eliminating uncertainty and promoting sensible and appropriate follow-through actions.

21^st Century Kanban

As today’s workforce tends to be mobile and geographically dispersed, the traditional office Kanban board is no longer functional as a central hub. Instead, digital Kanban boards have the potential to be key project management tools.

Based on the cloud, the updated Kanban board can bring together team members located in different parts of the world, offering real time overviews of the projects they’re working on, which they can access from laptops, tablets or mobile phones.

Digital Kanban boards facilitate the transfer of knowledge, joint problem solving and coordinating individual commitments. When each team member enjoys such benefits a ripple effect takes place, ultimately improving individual performances and the management of projects by bringing clarity and simplicity to processes.

The best Kanban tools also enable transparency and communication among team members, reinforcing their good behaviour and sense of personal responsibility. Underpinned by social features such as conversation chains, feedback features and activity streams, social tools offer full insight into who is in possession of what information, who is doing what and when – even showing who has or hasn’t completed their tasks on time.

By quickly obtaining information and being able to make swift decisions, team members can then connect effectively with others within the organization who can contribute to their work. This facilitates an open work culture with full transparency, self-organization and engagement as the main ingredients, eliminating the need for managers to attend endless touch-base meetings.

Key to efficient project management

We live and work in an increasingly connected and complex environment. To operate more efficiently, project managers are adopting new ways of working. They are starting to use the latest cloud collaboration and project management platforms in order to build collaborative communities within their organisations and increase their efficiency and competitiveness.

Digital boards are therefore key to enabling flatter organisational structures where managers can prioritize tasks and where team members can become more involved in the decision-making process.

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A new business world

Already, companies are seeing the effects of new digital and social trends. New regulations for flexible working in European countries including the UK will lead workers to increasingly expect new schedule agreements. By the year 2020, employees will gain even more autonomy thanks to 5G connectivity, which is predicted to be up to 100 times faster than 4G.

Thanks to high-speed connections, it won’t be necessary for employees to live close to their company’s offices, or even in the same country. Workers could soon choose to work for employers anywhere in the world and oversee the most rewarding projects from the comfort of their homes, while being adapting their schedule to their own needs, provided they achieve the project’s goals.

Whether they are digital at the core or not, every company will be influenced by permanent connectivity. In this way, a novice electrician will carry out his job wearing a camera, while taking instructions from a senior electrician located elsewhere. Similarly, one doctor will be able to guide another’s movements in an operating room on the other side of the world, in real time. With the proper tools and documents accessible to the right people through a shared cloud, it won’t matter anymore where team members are working on a project.

What’s more, large investments in desk-bound computers are coming to an end as many businesses implement BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, meaning they won’t necessarily have to allocate large amounts of budget to reap the benefits of 5G connectivity. As well as the IT departments, employees – who prefer to use operating systems and mobile devices they know well – will have a big say in technology decisions.

Increasing productivity

By embracing new ways of working and comprehending new cloud based project management platforms, businesses are operating more efficiently and increasing their competitiveness while their organisational cultures are becoming more collaborative.

More and more, employees are using online collaboration tools to exchange knowledge, solve problems and better manage projects. By being more connected, teams are essentially becoming increasingly productive and engaged.

Changes in project management

Thanks to full service project management tools, managers and team members can work on any type of project, no matter how complex, from anywhere in the world. Cloud technology enables easy and secure access to any type of file from laptops, phones and tablets, and allows several team members to work on the same document simultaneously without version conflicts. The latest project management platforms also allow instant messaging among team members, promoting open and transparent communication.

A good example of how this can be done is the use of Kanban boards, visual systems in which task cards are placed in columns labelled ‘To do’, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Done’. While they have long been seen as useful tools, it is their digital version which is truly taking centre stage. Digital Kanban boards have the potential to be at the heart of all communications and actions, offering a clear sense of evolution as work progresses and relevant task cards are moved into the appropriate columns.

We often think of technological changes as being complex. But in truth, the always connected world enables a return to simplicity and structure, as management is made easier and people are freed from the constraints of place and time.

Business growth

Cloud technology is already helping teams to become more and more involved in decision making. Collaborative cloud based tools are facilitating communication, contributing to making team members more effective while making them feel that they are part of a tight group.

Not only are teams working on their own terms, but they are also becoming increasingly productive, ultimately driving business growth.

Thanks to cloud technology and the advent of 5G networks, an uninterrupted, always connected environment is changing the way we live and work. Within the permanently connected world, the keys to business and personal growth will be to constantly adapt, stay on top of developments and harness new communication technologies.

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Cloud services are raging from simple storage and up to complex computing processes. Depending on the needs there are products that run completely into the cloud while others are just storing the data into the cloud. In the last few years there is a battle that is given between desktop based applications and cloud based ones.

Web-based Project Management Software

The notion of web-based products refers to software that runs within a browser on the client side. Generally the central computing part is kept entirely (computing and storage) within the cloud on the software provider side. However for certain offerings like RationalPlan it is also possible to have the central computing unit as a server module on the customer side. This might be a security measure for some customers.

Desktop Software

Cloud-based Solutions

Pros and Cons

As always nothing is perfect so there are obvious pros and cons for each possible solution.

The Pros

• Collaboration – since many companies are spread across the globe and have employees in multiple locations, cloud-based software can ease communication and increase teamwork productivity.
• Data Backup –  data loss is a real problem even for the biggest players on the market and even the best hardware servers can fall victim to power failures, system crashes and hackers or viruses attacks. However with cloud storage services users don’t have to ever worry about losing files since automatically files backups are done in multiple locations.
• Reduced Costs – having its own hardware for data storage requires companies to have employees to do the administrative work and a space for it and all these means additional costs. Using a cloud service it is cheaper since the maintenance and office space costs are shared to multiple companies that are using that service.

The Cons

• Security – using the cloud means storing all of a company’s data – which may include sensitive data, and company sensitive information – on others hardware. And those servers could be vulnerable to hackers, viruses, natural disasters or even physical theft. However the only real problem that appears only on cloud systems is related to security.
• Downtime – if the cloud provider runs into technical problems the clients will not be able to access their data until the provider solves the problem, situation which might take even a few hours… However the statistics say that the uptime of most cloud providers range between 99.6 percent and 99.9 percent which is not that bad for small businesses. For critical systems the most crucial data should be backed up in-house.
• Lower Speed – working over the Internet means bigger delays and response times as compared to local or Intranet solutions
• Less Features – cloud-based solutions are mostly web-based solutions that run within the clients browser and for this reason the list of features that can be offered is reduced as compared to a native application.

Cloud project management software is a great solution for small businesses to increased productivity and collaboration with lower costs and with data backup support. But there are also reasons to be cautious: the security, reliability and the speed. For such situations a dedicated server based project management system might be an alternative solution.

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