JointJS, a powerful diagramming library, helps developers and companies of any size build advanced visual applications and No-Code/Low-Code tools. It provides a wealth of ready-made demos and a wide range of prebuilt features that make creating applications including diagramming studios such as Kanban builders a breeze.
We equip developers with all the plugins they need to save time and focus their energy elsewhere such as StackLayoutView, StackLayout, CommandManager, and Toolbar.
New to this topic? Learn more about Kanban and its benefits 👇
Kanban is, as Kanbanize states, "a popular Lean workflow management method for defining, managing, and improving services that deliver knowledge work. It helps to visualize work, maximize efficiency and continuously improve." The word itself means "visual board" or "sign" and takes us to the beautiful country of Japan. As early as the 1940s, Toyota began optimizing its engineering process and applied this method as a planned system for its innovative just-in-time manufacturing. Over time, companies in other industries, such as software development, realized that they could use this methodology to visualize their work and make it more efficient. And they did.
There are four principles of Kanban:
Kanban is not about completely changing the way an organization operates today. It builds on what works and addresses bottlenecks that negatively impact processes and results.
Like Kaizen, Kanban takes into account that big changes are difficult to implement and can be met with rejection at multiple levels. The emphasis is therefore on incremental change and smaller but continuous improvement. Unlike Scrum or Agile methodologies, Kanban is less time-oriented - it does not organize work in sprints.
This principle supports the argument that Kanban does not prescribe change. However, it does support it on an ongoing basis. This is particularly advantageous for larger companies where (major) changes take longer to implement.
The drive for continuous improvement is not just a top management activity. Team members at all levels of the organization should be empowered to own the problem and feel empowered to solve it, as well as feel supported to improve on a daily basis.
From what has already been written above, the bottom line is pretty clear. Organisations and teams that apply this Lean methodology can benefit from shorter time cycle – the amount of time it takes for a unit of work to travel through the team’s workflow (from the moment work starts to the moment it ship), fewer bottlenecks, visual metrics that shed light on whether the team strives for continuous improvement and, of course, continuous delivery.
Modern development is not about building everything from scratch. The JointJS team equips you with plenty of ready-to-use demo apps that can serve as a boilerplate and radically reduce your development time. Start a free 30-day JointJS+ trial, get the source code of the Kanban application, and go from zero to a fully functional app in no time.