What is Kanbanize? Read on to discover how Kanbanize works—what problems it can help you solve and who uses it, along with a tour of its features, pricing and integrations. This overview will get you up and running so you can learn how you can manage projects with Kanbanize.
Looking for a Kanbanize review? Check out the Kanbanize review in the Digital Project Manager’s Best Kanban Tools review.
What Is Kanbanize?
Kanbanize is a Kanban software for Agile Project Management that allows its users to visualize projects, track progress and optimize workflow efficiency in order to deliver value faster to the market. Built with scale in mind, Kanbanize combines Kanban-style features that aim to help companies achieve organizational transparency and accelerate business agility.
Kanbanize was established in 2008 by Dimitar Karaivanov in Sofia, Bulgaria. While working in the software engineering industry, he first discovered the Kanban method which helped him reveal bottlenecks in work processes, eliminate waste and achieve efficiency. Seeing the power of Kanban, he went on a mission to “kanbanize” other organizations around the world, making them more efficient and predictable in the management of their projects.
The product first started out as a work process improvement tool, providing its users with customizable Kanban boards for workflow visualization and optimization. Since then, Kanbanize has evolved its features, entering the Agile project management space and becoming a complete solution for Kanban project management.
Who is Kanbanize for?
Kanbanize is a tool for project and portfolio managers, embarking on a Lean/Agile transformation. With the ability to bring transparency across the entire organization, Kanbanize helps managers improve team collaboration, facilitate status reporting and align planning of big projects with their day-to-day execution.
The software has been successfully adopted by numerous knowledge work teams in various industries including:
- Product Development
- Aerospace Engineering
- Construction
- IT Operations
- Pharmaceutical
- Architecture, etc.
For example, an IT Operations team can use Kanbanize to plan their projects and break them down into manageable tasks in one place, as seen from the image below:
This structure helps them improve their work organization by tracking the progress of both small tasks and bigger chunks of work in real-time. As a result, they are able to eliminate the need for constant status reporting which allows them to focus on the work that creates true value.
3 Big Problems That Kanbanize Solves
1. Inefficiencies in the Work Process & Project Delays
As projects become more and more complex nowadays, project managers often face the problem of generating excessive waste in the work process which may lead to project delays.
To solve this problem, Kanbanize introduces flexible Kanban boards with customizable stages (including sub-stages), swimlanes and multiple workflows. This gives project managers the ability to visualize and better organize work on how they see fit.
With the visualization of the work processes, everybody on a specific team can see how work matures over time and identify the work stages where it slows down (bottlenecks). With this knowledge in mind, project managers can take the necessary actions to remove those impediments and make work items flow more freely through the system.
As a result, the work process becomes more efficient which leads to a decreased likelihood of generating excessive project delays and unhappy customers.
2. Lack of High-Level Transparency
Remaining on the topic of workflow visualization, companies often lack high-level transparency which leads to misalignment between strategy and execution. This contributes to chaos inside organizations, miscommunication, and inability to quickly adapt to changes.
Kanbanize gives you the ability to align strategic planning and individual task execution with the help of Management and Team Workspaces. There, managers are able to visualize their strategic initiatives and projects as well as link them to the responsible for their execution team Kanban boards.
This ensures higher transparency across the entire organization which bridges the gap between senior executives and individual teams. As a result, companies are able to react to emerging changes or issues in a timely fashion, and thus achieve business agility.
3. Unpredictable Project Delivery
A common theme in project management is the question of “when will it be done”? When committing to delivering a product or service to clients, this is usually the first question that they ask. The problem is that a lot of the answers nowadays are given based on unrealistic estimates that rarely come to pass.
To deal with this problem, Kanbanize relies on forecasting rather than estimating. The system collects historical data about the team’s average performance in terms of cycle time, lead time, and throughput.
This data is then fed into the software’s powerful Analytics module which gives valuable insights regarding the most likely completion time of individual work items. Having this in mind, project managers become capable to answer with greater certainty the “when will it be done” question and make project delivery more predictable.
Kanbanize Features Overview
To get an idea of how Kanbanize works, here’s a tour of the main features and how they can help you achieve transparency and manage projects more efficiently.
1. Kanban Boards & Cards
The customizable Kanban Boards & Cards are the bread and butter of Kanbanize. With their help, users can map the various stages (and substages) of their work process, visualize individual tasks as well as organize them with swimlanes. Every Kanban card allows you to apply visual signals, identify its type (technical issue, design) as well as provid? fellow team members with insights on what’s going on with a given task (is it blocked, overdue, etc.). This way, the Kanban board at Kanbanize turns into an information radiator which eliminates the waste of doing constant status reporting and facilitates the flow of information.
2. Timeline Workflow
The Timeline Workflow is the planning tool at Kanbanize. Teams can set it up on their individual Kanban boards in order to plan and execute their initiatives/projects in one place. This way they are able to measure the actual work progress against their initial plan and modify it in real-time, when necessary. Something unique that defines the Timeline Workflow in Kanbanize is the addition of Work In Progress limits on the team initiatives level. This allows teams to have only a specific number of projects in progress at any given time based on their capacity. As a result, they are able to reduce context switching, keep their focus on finishing the current project work and thus increase throughput.
3. Multiple Workflows
Within the Kanbanize system, users can create Multiple Workflows on one Kanban board. This feature takes one step above the standard horizontal swimlanes for achieving a better work organization.
It allows you to visualize the work of cross-functional teams that have a different nature of tasks and require more tailored workflows. You can even decide to track the development of multiple projects simultaneously, without having to juggle between different Kanban boards in order to do so.
4. Management Workspace
The Management workspace is the flagship feature of Kanbanize that provides companies with the ability to achieve high-level transparency and scale Kanban across the entire organization. It serves as the ultimate solution for work breakdown structure and alignment between the company’s strategic objectives and its execution.
The integration of Management and Team Workspaces facilitates the flow of information across all organizational levels. This allows companies to react faster to emerging changes and thus achieve business agility.
5. Analytics
Kanbanize has a powerful Analytics module consisting of Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Heat Maps, Cycle Time Trends and more. With their help, users can analyze the stability of their work system and examine trends. This helps them adapt quickly in case of emerging red signs so they can take the necessary measures to continuously optimize their flow efficiency.
Moreover, the introduction of Cycle Time Scatter Plots and Throughput Histograms allows project managers to use historical performance data and make better forecasts regarding future project delivery.
Kanbanize Integrations
Kanbanize supports a powerful email integration that allows users to create Kanban cards via email. You can start an email thread and store it within the “Comments” section within every card.
Whenever a new reply is received, you can also choose to update your Kanban card so a predefined action occurs (moving the card to a specific work stage, notifying a team member, etc). This helps turn your board into a true ticketing system so an important communication is never lost.
Other than the email integration, Kanbanize integrates with a number of other third-party tools which include:
- Zapier, Trello
- Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox
- Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket
- and more…
Kanbanize Pricing
Kanbanize provides its users with a flexible pricing structure for teams and companies of all sizes. The system has two payment plans: monthly payments and annual subscription. The pricing starts at $99/month for 1-15 users, which translates to $6.6 per month per user (if you choose the annual subscription plan).
With Kanbanize, you can get a tailored pricing structure based on your team size. There are also optional add-ons that you may choose to include in your plan. Those contain business rules for workflow automation as well as for analytics and security modules.
To learn more, you can check out the pricing page in Kanbanize.
Try Kanbanize for Free
Kanbanize was built with the vision to help people do meaningful work and by that accelerate innovation. We aim to achieve that by helping project managers reveal bottlenecks in their work processes, visualize dependencies, optimize efficiency and thus deliver value faster to the market.
If you are looking for a Kanban project management tool, then Kanbanize is definitely a good choice. You can start your Free Trial and test the system first before advancing forward.