Setting Up Your First Kanban Board: Columns, WIP Limits, Policies

A Kanban board looks simple: a few columns and some cards. The value comes from the decisions behind it. What counts as a piece of work? When does it start? How much can be in progress at once? Those decisions are what turn a to-do list into a system that helps work flow.

This guide follows The Kanban Guide (May 2025 edition), a short, free reference whose creators are John Coleman and Daniel Vacanti. It defines Kanban as "a strategy for optimizing the flow of value through a process" and says it "can work with virtually any workflow," naming finance, utilities, healthcare and software among the fields that have used it.

You can build your first board in an afternoon. Plan to change it often.

What the Kanban Guide asks you to define

The Kanban Guide calls your team's shared understanding of flow a Definition of Workflow. At a minimum, it includes:

• A definition of the work items that flow through the system.
• When work items are considered started and finished.
• "One or more defined states that the work items flow through from started to finished."
• How work in progress (WIP) will be controlled.
• "Explicit policies about how work items can flow through each state."
• A service level expectation (SLE), a forecast of how long an item should take.

The guide then says, "The visualization of a DoW is a Kanban board." In other words, the board is a picture of these agreements. The steps below work through them in order.

Step 1: Decide what a card represents

Pick one type of work item to start. For a software team it might be a user-facing change. For a marketing team it might be a single piece of content. For example, imagine a three-person office team handling supply orders, vendor questions and small facilities requests; each request could be one card.

Try to keep cards roughly similar in scope. If one card is "fix a typo" and another is "move offices," your board will be hard to read and your numbers will be noisy. Split big items into smaller ones that can each be finished on their own.

Step 2: Map your columns from started to finished

Write down the steps a typical item really goes through today, not the ideal process. The Kanban Method published by Kanban University puts this as "Start with what you do now."

A simple first board might have these columns:

1. Options or Ready: items you might do next. These are not started yet.
2. In progress: someone is actively working on it.
3. Review: waiting for a check, approval or test.
4. Done: finished by your agreed definition.

Mark clearly where "started" begins. A common, practical choice is that an item is started when someone pulls it from Ready into In progress. Everything to the right of that line counts as work in progress.

Avoid creating a column for every tiny step. Three to five working states is usually enough to see where work gets stuck. You can add detail later.

Step 3: Set WIP limits

The Kanban Guide says "Kanban system members must explicitly control the number of work items in a workflow from started to finished." It deliberately does not dictate how; that control "can be represented on a Kanban board in any way that Kanban system members deem appropriate."

The most common approach for beginners is a number written at the top of each working column, or one limit across the whole started-to-finished section. Your first number is a guess. For example, imagine a four-person team; it might start with a limit of four for In progress and two for Review, then adjust after a couple of weeks.

The point of the limit is to create pull. In the guide's words, team members "should start work on an item (pull or select) only when there is a clear signal that there is capacity to do so," and "When WIP drops below the control set in the DoW, that can be a signal to select new work." When a column is full, the right move is usually to help finish something already in progress rather than start something new.

Step 4: Write explicit policies

Policies are the rules everyone can see. Write them on the board or in a short note next to it. Good first policies answer questions like:

• What must be true for a card to move into Review, and into Done?
• Who can add cards to Ready, and how is the order decided?
• How do we mark a blocked card, and what do we do about it?
• How do we handle a true emergency that cannot wait?

For example, a team might agree that a card moves to Done only after a second person has checked it, and that urgent items may exceed the WIP limit by one, but only with the team's agreement at the next check-in. Keep the list short enough that people actually read it.

Step 5: Add a service level expectation when you have data

The Kanban Guide describes an SLE as having "two parts: a period of elapsed time and a probability associated with that period." The guide's own example is "85% of work items will be finished in eight days or less."

On day one you have no data, so do not invent an SLE. Record the date each card starts and finishes. After a few weeks, look at how long finished items actually took and set a first SLE from your own history.

Step 6: Manage the board actively and keep improving it

The guide lists ways to actively manage items, including "Controlling WIP," "Ensuring work items do not age unnecessarily, using the SLE as a reference," and "Unblocking blocked work."

A short daily or every-other-day check-in at the board works well. A practical tip is to read the board from right to left, starting with items closest to Done, and ask what would help finish them. Pay attention to the oldest cards in progress; age is often the earliest sign of trouble.

The guide says team members are responsible for continuously improving their workflow "to achieve a better balance of effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability." Every few weeks, ask what slowed work down, then change one thing: a WIP limit, a column, a policy. Your board should look different in three months than it does today, and that is a good sign.

Key takeaways

• Define what a card is and exactly when work starts and finishes.
• Map columns to how work really flows today, and keep them few.
• Set explicit WIP limits and pull new work only when there is capacity.
• Write short, visible policies for moving, blocking and urgent work.
• Record start and finish dates so you can set a real SLE later.

Sources

• John Coleman and Daniel Vacanti, The Kanban Guide (May 2025)
• Kanban University, The Official Guide to The Kanban Method
• GOV.UK Service Manual, Agile tools and techniques