About

A ‘kanban’ or a ‘works in progress (WIP)’ board is a great way to manage a team of creatives who are all working on different projects.

It represents an opportunity to touch base on how projects are going and empowers team members to ask for help (or offer help) where needed.

It gives visibility to leaders without micromanaging or multiple check-ins and provides a space to manage budgets throughout the project - not just at the end!

I recommend setting up a weekly meeting to run through the WIP board. It shouldn’t take long, about 15-30minutes depending on the size of your team. Some agencies find bi-weekly or even daily WIPs helpful whereas other agencies might suit a fortnightly approach - it’s up to you!

Ask a different team member to lead the WIP each time, working through each card and calling on the assigned team member to provide the update.

Setting up the template

  1. Create cards for each phase of your project process. For example, the demo cards are set up for a Digital Agency with the following process:
    1. Discovery
    2. Design
    3. Prototype
    4. Development
    5. Soft launch
    6. Go Live!
  2. Use the Phase property ****to add the phases relevant to your process
  3. The heading of the card should be the name of the project
  4. Feel free to add or adjust any properties so they are tailored to your business
  5. Make sure you add a project lead to each card.
  6. Each column is labelled with the Status of the job, move the cards through the stages so you can have a quick birds eye view of where each of your projects are at.

How to use it with your team

  1. Hold a weekly meeting with your team to discuss all items on the board.
  2. For each card, the project lead can give:
    1. a status update
    2. check in on the project budget
    3. raise any items that might block this task from being completed on time
  3. Move cards to the relevant column as you go
    1. Not started - waiting to commence
    2. On track - project is on track
    3. Workshop - a workshop is required to move this forward
    4. With client - waitin
    7. g on client feedback before proceeding
    8. Done - Task complete!
  4. At the end, each team member should have a clear sense of their priorities and next steps (i.e book in a workshop, prompt the client for feedback etc.)

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