Comment by bityard

My first tech job was for a small IT consulting company that specialized in open source solutions in the early 2000's. The owner was basically the sales and overall strategy guy, I did consulting and implementations with clients, and most everyone else specialized in either their own low-level tech or business stuff.

At our height, the owner started bringing in more projects than our current workflow could handle. Customers started getting angry because their projects would slip through the cracks and get delayed if they weren't calling us up weekly to nag us for status. I sort of became the project manager by default because I touched most of the projects in some way and I was the go-to guy when someone had a question about the status of a project. I wasn't really happy about this because I liked doing tech stuff more than I liked managing projects.

In an attempt to preserve my sanity and get back to logging billable hours, I grabbed a deck of blank index cards and wrote down the company name, project name, status and for each project we had. (I didn't like spreadsheets at the time and this was faster than writing code.) That way, I didn't have to actively remember the status of every project. When needed or when asked, I could just grab the card and look. Once a week or so, I would update the status of each project on the card.

Not long after, I got to noticing that there was really only four (or five, I don't recall) states that any project could be in and decided to stop writing them on the cards. Instead I placed the cards in dedicated piles that represented the project's status and moved them around as needed. That worked well. Eventually, I thought it would good if everyone on the team could see the projects and their status as well, so I grabbed an old whiteboard, hung it on the wall behind me, drew a column for each status, and taped all the cards into the column corresponding to their status. This was a BIG improvement. I stopped wasting an hour every morning just going over project status with the boss and other employees. Everyone could just walk over to the area near my desk and look at the wall behind me. (It was an open-plan office before those were "cool.") Others could move the cards between columns themselves. When a client called demanding an update, I could just glance behind me.

A few jobs later, I took a compulsory three-day seminar on Agile and saw that they called this thing a Kanban board.