Okay, so before we proceed any further with Trello? Let's first have a look at the basic principles of Trello. And where did they get the inspiration from? So, you might have heard the word Kanban or Kanban or when it comes to searching for information about Trello. So Kanban has a lot of influence on Trello design and systems. So what is Kanban?

Kanban is a Japanese word for visual signal or card. So, in the late 1940s, Toyota was one of the companies that use can then in their manufacturing process, basically in their factories to increase productivity. Due to the nature of how visual the system is, it allows teams to communicate much more efficiently and it avoids miscommunication. Basically, this is due to the fact that as human beings, it's a lot easier for us to miscommunicate when we're using text and verbal communication. So something that's more visual, you can immediately see it from far away. And these visual signals or cards are meant to indicate very straightforward and simplified status.

With this increase of efficiency, Teresa was able to find ways to reduce waste and maximize value in return. So when we talk about waste reduction, it's not just about supplies and materials being wasted. It's also about time wastage for humans the workforce. So rather than wasting your time doing things that could have been done by, for example, in today's world. menial tasks can be done by bots, robots, machineries, and even software. So this should free up more time for employees to then use their creativity and problem solving capabilities to find solutions, and also to innovate and bring new ideas to an organization.

That's where the true value of employees come from. So, how does Kanban work? Well, as I mentioned before, it's very visual. So even we look at Trello it's very attractive Because of how visual everything is. So the first step is to categorize things using specific colors. And the most traditional way is to actually categorize things using sticky notes.

So you might have seen this image before, there's someone who has a huge whiteboard, and they'll start labeling things and the to do, doing and done. And then you'll see a bunch of sticky notes with different colors and different information on each of those sticky notes. So by visualizing your workload, you're able to, in an instant, identify certain bottlenecks. And also, there's a lot of transparency in what's going on within the team or organization. And other core principle of Kanban is limiting the work in process In other words work in progress. So there's a lot of different ways this could help in productivity.

Because at the end of the day, we as human beings have a limit to how much we can focus, there's a limited supply of willpower per day. And this heavily impacts productivity at the workplace. And there are other factors as well, such as personal problems, issues with family members, and so on, which would occasionally impact productivity of your employees. So by limiting the amount of work that you should be focusing on, either in a single week, a single month, you're then able to increase or maintain the quality of your output. Because no matter how much you're doing at your workplace, until tasks are considered done. They bring next to zero value to the organization and especially to the customers.

So you don't want to overload yourself and your team with too many tasks. But you also need to kind of find a way to measure how much is your capacity or in Agile terms its velocity or you can call it workload that your team or yourself is capable off at any given time. Which then brings us to the next point. The other principle of Kanban is the focus on the flow of tasks. Like I mentioned before, unless the task is flowing from to do in progress, and finally to done it brings no value to the customer or the organization. This way you can also collect metrics analyze how much flow you're getting out of your processes.

This can also indicate future problems. For example, if you keep getting into situation where your workload increases at a certain season of the year, you can plan ahead and have all the data and metrics to support that decision making that request that you have to management to ramp up resources for a short period of time. This would lead to the next point, which is continuous improvement. Once you have a combat system in place, it's meant to be the cornerstone for continuous improvement. And various teams can measure the effectiveness of the process of the systems that you have in place using data and also metrics That can be set internally. And the quality that comes from the output, you can keep on experimenting and see which parts of your process can be tweaked to further enhance your your output.

So, basically, these are the four principles of Kanban. There are many definitions of Kanban out there, if you do a quick Google search, you can find a lot of them. And if you ask different people, they will explain it to you different ways. But this is basically a condensed version of it. And core principles of Kanban is applied across other project management methodologies as well, such as agile and Lean management. But that's a subject for another course altogether.