Kanban excel template download

We’ve compiled the most useful Kanban board templates for Kanban leads, Scrum masters, project managers, service delivery managers (SDMs), service request managers (SRMs), and Agile team members.

Included on this page, you’ll find four essential Kanban board templates: a basic Kanban board template, a Kanban board spreadsheet template, a Kanban board presentation template, and an Agile sprint with Kanban board template. Plus, find tips for using Kanban board templates, and discover the benefits of using a Kanban board template.

When you are working on a project, you must ensure the sustainability of every project from the very beginning to its end. After all, one of the main tasks of a project manager is to provide effectiveness and efficiency in the company’s best interests. This Kanban Board Excel Template lets you track your entire process by preparing a scrum board.

With Automated Kanban Board following each step will no longer be a painful process. Even without a software program or another tool. All you have to do is input the necessary data into the database and refresh the workbook to display all your results.

If you do not have any idea about kanban board workflow management approach, check this Wikipedia description to learn more.

Kanban Board Excel Template Features:

Basically, the template has 5 main sections:

Kanban

In this section, you will display the kanban cards depending on the selected board and the filter you choose.
You may check and display the projects under many filters such as priority, responsible person, task due date, overdue, and time until the due date.

If you have more than one board you may also input that data in the database and display your tasks on each border separately or you may also display all by choosing “All” from the board section.

It is also possible to change the order of the board status by choosing the required status from the drop-down list and deleting the unnecessary ones on Kanban Sheet.

Calendar of Kanban Board Excel Template

In the calendar, you can select the month and year from the drop-down menu.
Also, you can specify the person responsible, the priority and the status. As a result, you can see the change you created in the calendar.

Dashboard

On the Dashboard section, you may check the performance and the general view of your projects. Once there is a change in your data, use refresh button to update it.

Info: You may also find the notes section in the right upper corner if you have any notes for any task or project.

Database

You can use the database to enter your task and its properties. Just select the board section, responsible person, priority and statistics from the dropdown menu.
To be able to select them, you need to list your options in the Settings section.

• Fiish date is the date that you completed the task
• Due Date is the date that has been set for the end of the project.

If you have any notes you may input them in the remarks section.

Settings

You can use the data you input area in the settings section, to be later on selected in other sections.
Type down your statuses in “Status Section“, Responsible People to “Team Members“, and your boards to “Board Section“.

Following that, you may define five priority levels and decide their color representations in the Kanban Board. Overdue % Settings forms the Overdue Percentage Chart on the Dashboard. Define your levels for each priority to see it on the Dashboard.

The date format on the Kanban board can be changed in the Settings section.

How to make further adjustments in the settings section?

Select your desired Date Format as well as the connector style to be used for dates. You can also decide on the overdue principal, from the Overdue definition settings. Information on both options is provided within the yellow instruction notes.

Offering the next level of customization, you can even decide the exact data to be shown on the Kanban board. For this please use the Card Data Selection.

Having full power on your project will help you plan your route and let you make effective plans in the future.
Moreover, we can choose to see start date, end date or due date. Also, choose to see only the person responsible in the second row or we can also see the progress of the task.

Finally, there is an additional filter for tasks in the kanban sheet. You can filter tasks whose due date is in the next X days. For example, in the next 5 days. You also update the X in the settings.

Kanban Board Excel Template Features Summary:

• Automated Kanban Board in Excel
• Simple workflow management
• Advanced reporting with dynamic charts
• Easy-to-use filters to see overall performance
• Full print ready
• Informational notes included
• No installation needed, ready to use
• Works both on Mac and Windows
• Compatible with Excel 2013 and later versions
• Includes VBA code and macros

Use this free Excel kanban board template to visualize your team’s workflow and allow them to manage their tasks and collaborate on work. Kanban boards are the go-to tool for agile teams, but they can help anyone using any project management methodology who wants to add transparency to their work process.

An Excel kanban board can only take you so far. If you open the kanban board in ProjectManager, you get access to automated workflows and multiple project views. Toggle from the kanban to a task list, calendar, Gantt chart and sheet view—all of which share the same real time data. Our kanban also is connected to a live dashboard and customized reports so you can stay on schedule and within your budget. Get started with ProjectManager today for free and build a powerful kanban workflow in minutes.

What Is a Kanban Template?

A kanban board is an agile tool that visualizes workflow and is popular with DevOps software developers, manufacturers, construction workers and anyone executing a project. It provides transparency into a team’s process by showing where the task is in terms of production.

It does that by breaking up a project into stages. At its most basic, those stages are to do, doing and done. These are usually shown as columns on a board, whether that’s a physical board or one created in a software program. Tasks are represented by cards, which move from column to column as they progress through the production cycle.

These kanban cards are full of important information. They will have the name of the task and a description, who is assigned to the task and due dates. There is often a place to add tags, priority and even tracking to show what percentage complete the task is. Some kanban cards can have comments added and files attached to further the execution of the work.

What’s Included in This Kanban Board Template for Excel?

If you download the free kanban board template for Excel, you’ll get a version of the kanban columns and cards on an Excel sheet. While this isn’t the most favorable way to use the tool, it’s better than not having the option. Of course, if you open the free kanban board in ProjectManager, you’ll have a more dynamic tool that does much more than a static template can.

But we’ll talk about ProjectManager in a minute. First, let’s take a closer look at the Excel kanban board. The kanban template is fully customizable. You can divide your production cycle however you care to. We have divided production into five phases: backlog, to do, doing, in review and done.

Kanban Columns

Excel isn’t an ideal tool for creating and using kanban boards, but our template does the best that it can within Excel’s limited abilities. The kanban columns indicate a stage in production, from backlog to done. They go from left to right and mimic the production cycle.

Kanban Cards

Under each column heading there are the kanban cards. Each card is color-coded to represent the priority level. Inside the card are the task name, a short description, who it’s assigned to and its due date. Again, you can customize these cards to include the information you want.

The cards can be copied and pasted from one column to the next. That means you can copy a backlog card and paste it into the doing when it’s in production. Then copy and paste it forward until it’s done and change the priority color as needed.

Why Should You Use This Kanban Board Template for Excel?

Using a kanban board template for Excel is an excellent tool for understanding workflow and seeing the process from start to finish. This template also adds efficiencies that go beyond the productivity of having teams collaborate on the shared space of the kanban board.

For example, using our free Excel kanban board reduces status meetings. The status of the sprint is clear on the kanban board by looking at the kanban cards and the data on them. This results in teams having better conversations about the work that’s visible for all to see.

Of course, agile teams still have daily scrums and the backlog must be groomed to determine which card moves forward into the next sprint. The kanban board visualizes this so team members are aware of what they need to focus on and finish before moving on to another task.

This speaks to all types of teams but is especially helpful for distributed teams that are working from different sites on the same tasks. A shared kanban board makes it easy for everyone to work independently but together.

How to Use a Kanban Board Template

Once you download the free kanban board for Excel, you can fill in your tasks on the kanban card and place them under the appropriate column heading. As these kanban cards move through the production cycle, you can copy and paste them into the next column.

Templates are static documents and can be manually intensive as well as frustrating in terms of process. That’s why we also offer a free kanban board on ProjectManager, online software that fulfills the promise of kanban boards as efficient, flexible and collaborative project management tools.

With ProjectManager, you can onboard your team and set their availability to make it easy to assign them. Custom and automated workflows can be made with task approvals to ensure that only those with the authority to approve tasks can move them forward. There are also security settings to protect your proprietary work. We’ll get into more details in a moment.

When to Use This Kanban Board Template

Kanban boards, as noted, are very popular with teams working in a lean or agile manner, but they’re also popular in manufacturing that limits work-in-progress (WIP). It visualizes what’s to do, doing and done. Therefore, it’s useful for teams that are getting a lot of work coming in with a variety of priorities and size.

You’d also find a use for an Excel kanban board template for clearing up bottlenecks that can delay schedules and add unwanted costs to a project. Kanban boards do this by facilitating communications and information sharing across teams and departments. Plus, they provide transparency that gives managers the opportunity to see potential roadblocks and reallocate resources to avoid them.

Who Should Use This Kanban Board Template for Excel?

As noted earlier, an Excel kanban board template is popular with lean and agile teams. But it would be rare to find any of them using the static template when they can have greater flexibility with kanban board software such as ProjectManager.

But, again, kanban boards are not exclusive to lean and agile teams. They can be found in a variety of industries and from there have found favor with teams that follow a repeatable process and want to improve their workflow through transparency.

Some recognizable brands that use kanban boards include Nike, Jaguar, Pixar animation and Spotify. But it’s also found in the medical profession where hospitals use it to solve supply issues and medical device-makers use it for warehousing. Even fashion retailers, such as Zara, use kanban boards for manufacturing and tracking store inventory.

More Free Project Management Excel Templates

Kanban boards are only one type of project management tool. ProjectManager has free project management templates for Excel and Word that gives you more choices of how to work. There are also free downloadable templates for every phase of your project. Here are a few of the more popular ones.

Gantt Chart Template

The Gantt chart is one of the most popular project management tools, especially for waterfall methodology in construction and other fields. This free template for Excel organizes your tasks and displays them on a visual timeline to see the entire project duration in one place.

Project Plan Template

You can’t use any project management tool unless you’ve first laid out the project plan. Our free project plan template for Word makes it easy to define your project scope, milestones, phase, tasks and resource requirements. Then you can schedule and budget the product.

Project Budget Template

The project budget is part of the larger project plan, but it requires more detail. Using our free project budget template for Excel helps you better estimate what the project will cost and avoid having to request more funds later. You can capture labor, materials and more all in our detailed free template.

Managing Kanban Board Workflows in ProjectManager

As we stated earlier, templates are great but only to a point. Of course, if you opened the kanban board in ProjectManager, then you’re already aware of the difference. It’s night and day. Our software lets you work anywhere and at any time and delivers real-time data. We offer resource management, risk management and task management tools as well as multiple project views including kanban boards, Gantt charts, task lists, sheet and calendar views.  Plus, automate workflows and add task approvals to streamline your processes.

Create Custom Workflows and Automation

Manage your kanban boards with rules that dictate the path a task takes. You can also define the users who have the authority to move that task throughout its stages by setting up task approvals to ensure the quality of your deliverables. It’s easy to automate by setting up triggers that change the status, priority and much more, which frees teams from busy work and gives them time to focus on more important tasks.

Track Progress and Performance

When everyone is working off a static template, you must manually input data and can never be certain that you’re working off of the most current version. Our kanban board and all other project views deliver real-time data that’s shared throughout the software, including in a live dashboard that gives you a high-level view of time, cost and much more. It’s all displayed in easy-to-read graphs and charts and requires no time-consuming setup as with lightweight tools.

Related Kanban Content

If you’re still looking for more information about kanban boards, we have links to some related content below. ProjectManager is powerful and secure project management software, but it’s also an online hub for everything related to project management. We publish weekly blogs and have in-depth guides, videos and, of course, free templates. Here are some of our more popular kanban posts.

• Kanban Principles & Best Practices Explained
• Kanban Inventory Management: How to Run a Kanban System
• How to Make an Ideal Kanban Workflow for Your Team

Now that you’ve had a chance to read up on kanban boards, why not open one in ProjectManager, our award-winning project management software that helps you plan, manage and track your work in real time. Join teams at companies as varied as Nestle, Siemens and Avis. Get started with ProjectManager today for free. 

After learning about Agile development, Kanban, and Scrum, we decided to try implementing a very simple system to help our small team work more effectively. Vertex42 is focused on continuous content and product delivery (just like many software companies), but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with too many tasks and competing priorities. So, we decided to combine some principles from both the Kanban and Scrum methods into a simple tool that we can use both collaboratively and remotely. This Kanban Board Template was born from that idea.

Advertisement

Description

At first look, this spreadsheet may seem like just a glorified task list, but it’s much more than that. It was designed to apply principles from agile project management. The idea of categorizing and prioritizing activities and moving the tasks through the «To Do», «In Progress» and «Done» lanes comes from the Kanban method. The idea of using a backlog and identifying activities to complete within a two-week period or «sprint» comes from the Scrum method.

What makes a good collaborative task management tool? In our experience, the answer is that we actually WANT to use it. And that’s what we’ve found with this spreadsheet … it’s fun to use, extremely simple, and takes very little time to update.

Update 10/1/2021: Try the new Spreadsheet.com version! It has a card-style Kanban board view that allows you to drag cards between lanes. It also features automations that make it easy to move backlog ideas into new sprints and to archive tasks by simply checking a box.

What is a Kanban Board?

A Kanban board is a collaborative work flow or task management tool used in Agile project management. Team members add cards or sticky notes to a board on the wall representing the features or tasks they will be working on during their one or two-week sprint. The team has regular stand-up meetings to discuss their progress, update priorities, and physically move the tasks from In Progress to Testing to Done as they complete them.

Online Collaborative Kanban Boards

There are quite a few software companies that have developed online agile tools. Many of these, such as LeanKit and smartsheet have developed a «card» system where features and tasks are added to and moved between columns on the screen. With Vertex42’s new template designed specifically for Agile sprints, Spreadsheet.com is now a great option for blending spreadsheet functions with visual Kanban Board views and email notifications.

Kanban in a Spreadsheet

Instead of placing cards in vertical lanes our template for Excel and Sheets uses horizontal lanes, where each row represents a separate card (activity, task, feature, etc.). In the Spreadsheet.com version, you can also switch to the Kanban Board view to see and edit the tasks as cards.

It is easy to move rows around in Excel and Sheets. In Excel: Select a row, then hold the SHIFT key as you left-click on the edge of the range and drag it. In Google Sheets: Select a row and then drag it when the mouse icon changes to a Hand.

You can add more details or notes to your tasks by adding columns, without making it any more difficult to move tasks between lanes.

Google Sheets vs. Excel

Google Sheets provides a great place to use this Kanban board template because of real-time collaboration and the ease of moving tasks between lanes by dragging and dropping.

When using Excel, we recommend using Microsoft OneDrive because it allows you to upload and share the file with multiple users, giving everyone online access to the file as well as access through Excel’s mobile apps.

An Office 365 subscription allows you to edit the Kanban workbook in real-time using the co-authoring feature of Excel. See this article.

What is a Sprint?

A sprint in the Scrum methodology is normally a week or two-week period where the team works on developing and delivering a fully functional feature, or perhaps even an entire product. In our case, that might be a new template or maybe a new blog article.

What we like most about the sprint approach is that it provides a deadline. By estimating the hours to complete each activity, we can plan how much we might accomplish during the sprint.

Backlog: We love the idea of the backlog. Maybe we don’t use it the way it was meant to be used, but it allows us a place to stick all our ideas without cluttering up our current sprint goal. We can evaluate the list of backlog items before the next sprint to decide what to work on next. Hiding the rows in the backlog keeps them out of sight and out of mind — to avoid having the huge list of to-dos distract us from the priority items.

Sprint Progress Chart: The top of the worksheet shows a new type of chart that I developed specifically for this spreadsheet. It shows the overall progress as filled-in flag icons and the current day as an hourglass, so you can interpret the chart as your race against time.

The formula for creating a sprint chart is explained in this blog article. If you have questions or comments, please let us know by commenting in that post.

References and Resources

This page isn’t meant to teach you everything you need to know about Agile, Kanban, and Scrum. To learn more, here are a few resources we found useful:

• LeanKit Kanban at LeanKit.com — A good explanation of how to use a Kanban board, and it shows their online tool that is based on the card system.
• The Scrum and Sprint within an Agile Project — at dummies.com — Explains some of the basics.
• Collaborate on Excel in Real-Time with Co-Authoring — at support.office.com — Learn how you can co-author this template in real-time with Excel for Office 365.

Note: The information on this page describes how we have adapted some of the Agile principles into our own work and into the Kanban template. It is not meant as a general reference for how Agile, Kanban, and Scrum should be applied in all businesses.

A Kanban board template is a tool that helps limit work in progress, help visualize work, and maximize flow and efficiency. Also, it helps the DevOps and agile teams establish order. Kanban boards help service and technology teams with the amount of work and its execution.

Elements of a Kanban Board Template

The Kanban board was established by David Anderson. Moreover, the board has four components, which are the following: Columns, visual signals, commitment points, and a delivery point.

• Columns — Columns are a hallmark of the kanban boards. Each column composes a workflow and represents a specific activity. Cards flow through until a workflow is complete. 
• Visual Signals — They include tickets, stickies, or otherwise. Kanban teams work items onto cards and write all of their projects. Each card encapsulates one user story for agile teams. These visual signals help stakeholders and teammates understand what they are working on once on the board.
• Commitment point — The team picks up an idea at the commitment point, and work starts on the project.
• Delivery point — This is the endpoint of the Kanban team’s workflow. The service or the product is in the customer’s hand at the delivery point. The said team takes cards from the point of commitment to the delivery as fast as possible.

Kanban Board Google Sheets

Getting started with Kanban boards

This method takes three things into consideration:

You understand processes and respect current job titles, roles, and responsibilities. 

• You encourage leadership from individual to senior management.
• You agree to improve through change.

Kanban Template Powerpoint

Do you follow the Kanban methodology to check progress and organize tasks? Then these templates will look familiar to you. Choose the template design best fits your requirements and edit the sticky notes or cards accordingly. All of them have different colors, and you can also add some tables on them just in case you prefer a traditional approach.

These Kanban templates are a digital adaptation of the traditional workflow technique. Instead of using a whiteboard, use these Kanban templates since they offer the same functionality in an environment with less communication time. These templates are a great tool to manage daily tasks at a team level.

Provide accurate and compelling information on your project and sprint progress with this visually rich, presentation-ready Kanban board presentation template. This template will enable you to create your Kanban tickets, assign them to the team members, and move them through the agile sprint stages: Backlog, Active, Development, Testing, Deployment, and Complete. This template is unique, presentable online, and shareable, and helps project managers, scrum masters, agile team members, and project sponsors ensure that the sprint is on schedule.

Kanban CFD Excel Template

The Kanban CFD Excel Template is a useful tool to analyze workflow through a process or system. There are tools that can produce these charts for you but the best way is to create them using excel. You can create a template using a worksheet with a column for the date and columns for each state in the modeling process

Notion Kanban Board Template

The Notion Kanban board helps to show items in a database move through process stages. They are an easy way to track progress and keep tasks on track. You can add content to every card on the board and see more by clicking the card. You can also customize what you see on the card by clicking on the right of the database and moving the cards. 

OneNote Kanban template

You can create a kanban board in OneNote similar to a kanban board in Excel. Create columns to manage workflow with the flexibility to add as many colours, columns, and details as needed.

Online Kanban Borad Trello

Trello allows the creation of boards, lists, and cards to facilitate you and your team to prioritize and organize your projects. Trello focused less on project management style and more on the specific Kanban board style.

Paid Kanban Board Templates Online

Several different software and app options are available that offer Kanban boards online.

Jira Kanban Borad

‍Jira calls itself the top software development tool. It allows you to categorize and sort tasks and track progress. It also allows You can create reports to look at projects’ progress.

Asana Kanban Project Management

‍Another Kanban system is Asana, used by groups from VOX Media, Deloitte Accounting, and Salesforce. Asana gets everyone to stay on track with project deadlines and individual tasks and strives to keep those deadlines in check.

Monday Kanban Project Planning

More than 100,000 organizations use Monday’s services, including Unilever products, Uber, and General Electric. By being built for remote teams, this platform follows a Kanban program. It enables a view of project plans in different ways to get an idea of project progress. Tasks and individuals can also be added seamlessly.

Kanban Template FAQs

Remember show and tell? The day you could finally bring your pet fish to school and introduce it to your first-grade peers? Those were the days. 😌 

As professionals, we now face similar situations in the form of presenting ideas, brainstorming, and executing projects with the group. 

We’ve since learned showing is more powerful than just telling, and we’ve come up with diverse, engaging ways to convey our ideas. This is a huge win for people who process information differently, including the 65% of our population who identify as visual learners.

Enter: Kanban boards. 

Kanban boards are a highly visual agile project management approach to help teams optimize their workflow, promote transparency, identify bottlenecks, and quickly change course if needed. While the goal is to start saving time ASAP, setting one up from scratch can be lengthy, and even counterproductive to a point—that’s where templates come in handy. 🤓

Teams function faster and more efficiently with the right Kanban board templates tailored to their unique needs—but who has the time to trial and error every Kanban template that floods their Google search? We do. 🙋🏼‍♀️

Consider this article your crash course on all things Kanban including structure, FAQs, tips, benefits, and of course, 10 free Kanban templates to crush your workflow goals! 

What is a Kanban board template?

Kanban board templates are customizable, pre-built boards that expedite the preparation and set-up phases involved in creating your board so you can start saving time in no time. Essentially, they are fill-in-the-blank, ready-to-go Kanban boards that you can tweak or edit as needed. 

And since Kanban boards can be used for a number of different departments and industries, a well-structured template ensures that your team is using them in the most efficient way possible. Still, this is only scratching the surface when it comes to the benefits of a flexible Kanban board template!

If you followed the four aforementioned steps by sketching them out in your notebook, you likely already see the appeal of using intuitive software to help you fill out the meat and potatoes of your board.

Bringing your work onto a platform designed to manage your Kanban board will kickstart its benefits ten-fold. Here, we’ll show you. 🙂

ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform built for teams of all sizes and across industries to manage projects more efficiently, collaborate smarter, and bring all of their work together in one place. Customization is at the core of every ClickUp feature, including over 15 flexible ways to visualize your workload with views like List, Calendar, Gantt, and ClickUp’s Kanban-like Board view.

Board view is the answer to all of your Kanban-related questions. 

With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and multiple ways to arrange your tasks, Board view truly puts the power in your hands to make the board your own. Group your tasks by status, assignees, priority, and more in a matter of seconds to customize how you see your project progress, or even see multiple workflows at a glance, regardless of their statuses. 

Since you can use Kanban boards for virtually any use case, custom statuses in ClickUp let you create unique statuses that speak to your team’s specific needs directly from your Board. 

Plus, you can measure the team’s workload by sprint points and time estimates to keep an eye on your Work in Progress Limits.

While these are some of Board view’s key features, there are still hundreds of other tools to boost your productivity in ClickUp. Customizable software can help you take the benefits of your Kanban board even further, but it doesn’t erase the time commitment or learning curve involved in setting up a Kanban board for the very first time. 

That’s when templates save the day. 💪🏼

Benefits of using Kanban board templates

More than just a time-saver, Kanban board templates help you start things off on the right foot with a clean and well-maintained interface, ensuring that your board is always ready to present—even on short notice—to stakeholders, managers, or other departments. 

They also inspire innovation in the way of customization, automations, and more effective task statuses. Since the Kanban approach can benefit a range of use cases, having a designated template can act as your training wheels, showing you which statuses, Work in Progress Limits, and automations are commonly useful for your industry.

What’s more, there is a template for every skill level. If you are new to Kanban boards, there are plenty of beginner-friendly templates to ease your way into this agile methodology. Or, if you’ve been using boards for years and need a fresh perspective or seeking ways to innovate your Kanban process, templates are an excellent way to teach you how to uplevel your board. 

The main takeaway here is that Kanban board templates are here to help you. Let a well-designed template do the heavy lifting for you so you can focus on your project and the team moving it forward. 

10 Kanban board templates

We’re talking a big game here—let’s see these powerful templates in action! Here are 10 of our favorite Kanban board templates for ClickUp, OneNote, and Excel, and how they can take your team to the next level. 

1. Simple Kanban Board template by ClickUp

Apply the Simple Kanban Board template to your ClickUp Workspace and start optimizing your release cycle in no time. This Folder is packed with five statuses to divide your tasks between, and a help Doc with tips and a breakdown of every feature. It even offers additional resources for setting up task automation, creating checklists for smaller to-dos, and suggested integrations to make your transition to Board view in ClickUp even smoother. 

The task statuses are versatile enough to fit almost any workflow, especially if you require edits or feedback on your tasks—from marketing to product development, even blog editing or graphic design. While this is a more intermediate-level template, its step-by-step help Doc is straightforward and easy to follow no matter your Kanban experience. 

2. Agile Management Kanban Board template by ClickUp

The Agile Management Kanban Board template by ClickUp helps you set up a complex workflow, fast. 

The agile approach can feel overwhelming at first, but this template creates a Space in ClickUp with everything you need to implement a basic agile workflow in minutes. 

For agile teams working in sprints, you have the option of enabling 13 different ClickApps to customize how you organize your backlog, manage workloads, and work with your team. These include Work in Progress Limits, Milestones, dependencies, Sprint Points, and more! 

With 30 custom statuses, one Custom Field, eight tags, six views, and four automations, this template is packed with all of the necessary features to provide feedback, pivot resources, and start delivering on outcomes faster. 

3. Simple Sprints Kanban Board template by ClickUp

Dip your toes in the fountain of sprints with the Simple Sprints Kanban Board template by ClickUp! Less complex and more intermediate-friendly than the previous Agile Management Template, this template applies a Space to your ClickUp Workspace with nine statuses, nine ClickApps, and pre-set Board and List views. 

This template covers all of the sprint basics for Agile teams to ship products faster and offers a helpful Doc to show you how to align this template with your workflow and make the most of your Multitask Toolbar.

4. Account Management Kanban Board template by ClickUp

If you’re an office manager, a financial advisor, in sales, or simply a person trying to get their budget in check, this template is for you. 

The Account Manager Kanban Board template by ClickUp tracks everything from a user’s last activity to account renewals, contacts, and risks. This Folder adds 19 helpful statuses—count ‘em!— including Nurturing, Up For Renewal, Churned, Onboarding, and more—perfect for potential customers and maintaining relationships with current clients. 

This is also a great template for connecting with new clients with seven view types to nurture engagement with leads and Form view to sign up new clients in a survey with responses that can be converted into actionable ClickUp tasks. And did we mention this template is rich in Custom Fields? With 10 to choose from, you have even more ways to sort, filter, and group your Kanban board.

5. Kanban Cumulative Flow Template for Excel

We mentioned Kanban boards can come in all different shapes and sizes—and this template is a great example of that! Teams love Kanban boards because they focus on a continuous and consistent flow of work to finish projects on time, one task at a time. With Work in Progress Limits, teams can control the number of tasks they’re working on, ensuring that they haven’t bitten off more work than they can chew. This Excel Kanban board template focuses on that aspect of Kanban boards.

Simply fill in the date associated with your task or process and the number of Work In Progress tasks allowed per day to see your workflow populate in a visual Cumulative Flow chart in Excel with colors associated with each task. 

This is a great tool for highly visual learners who need to see how tasks stack up against each other each day! 

Swear by your Excel-based workflows? We have just the tool for you! Learn all about how to make Kanban boards in excel, find additional Excel templates, resources, and more on the ClickUp blog!

6. Team Requests Kanban Board template by ClickUp

Kanban boards are a popular agile project management tool, but they’re really trusted and used by teams across departments—including HR!

The Team Requests Kanban Board template by ClickUp is a crucial tool for HR, IT, and office managers in charge of tracking and organizing their remote team’s requests. 

This Folder adds four views to your Workspace, including a separate Kanban board for the different types of requests coming in and an Internal Request Form with responses that can be turned directly into ClickUp tasks that appear on your Board. Plus, five statuses ensure that no request falls through the cracks. 

7. Video Production Kanban Board template by ClickUp

The Video Production Kanban Board template by ClickUp is a perfect example of how versatile Kanban boards can be. Plan your shoot schedule from pre to post-production with this beginner-friendly template. Visualize your schedule in a List or move tasks down the production pipeline by dragging and dropping them on your Kanban board. 

Plus, this template comes with a help Doc to elevate your organization and push your creative projects over the finish line without breaking a sweat. 

8. Project Management Kanban Board template by ClickUp

If all of these templates sound great but may be a little too complicated for your Kanban experience level so far, this is your template. 

Whether you’re managing a project or organizing your weekly to-dos, this beginner-friendly project management Board template by ClickUp covers all of your Kanban basics. Get started with a Board already divided into five statuses that can apply to virtually any workflow—Open, In Progress, Review, Blocked, and Closed. 

9. Campaign Tracking Kanban Board template by ClickUp

This is the template your marketing team has been dreaming of. ✨

Between juggling different tools, multiple campaigns, staying within budget, and performance pressure, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by your marketing workflow—but the Campaign Tracking and Analytics template by ClickUp is designed to keep track of those many moving parts. 

This template is packed with 10 Custom Fields so you can bring as much detail into each task as necessary and visualize your campaigns in the way that works best for you. With multiple campaigns and tasks working in tandem, your Kanban board ensures that no one is pulling more weight than they can handle. Beyond your Board, you’ll find your campaigns scheduled in a clean Calendar view and a List of all campaigns to avoid overlap. 

10. Kanban Board Template by OneNote

Similar to how you can structure your Kanban board in Excel or on a digital whiteboard, you can also create a board in OneNote! Create columns to manage your workflow at the office or at home with the flexibility of adding as many columns, colors, and details as you need. 

More Project Management Template Resources:

• Project Management Templates
• CRM Templates
• Product Management Templates
• Gantt Chart Project Management Templates
• RACI Chart Templates
• Milestone Templates

Kanban board basics and FAQs 

With its roots in automotive manufacturing during the 1940s, Kanban boards have adapted and expanded to benefit teams across industries with a simple yet flexible framework for visualizing workflows.

Teams return to Kanban boards because they are straightforward, intuitive, and consistent. They are flexible enough to support nearly any use case—and once you’ve learned how to interpret one Kanban board, you can essentially read them all.

Used correctly, Kanban boards create a smooth and continuous flow of work, promote transparency, and clearly define the owners of each task. 

Though they aren’t limited to just one “look,” Kanban boards often start with at least three columns—or statuses—that represent stages to completion, and task cards that move across the board until the project is done.

But what do they actually look like? Well, let’s make one! 

How do you structure a Kanban board?

You can build your board IRL on a surface like a cork board or personal whiteboard—or with the help of a dynamic Kanban software designed for this approach. But whether you prefer the board on your desk or on-screen, follow along as we break down the hallmark characteristics every efficient Kanban board must have:

1. Columns

The columns on your Kanban board represent the statuses each task must go through before it can be considered finished. If you’re just starting out with the Kanban approach, keep it simple with three columns that ring similar to To-Do, In Progress, and Done, but ideally, you’re aiming for the same number of columns as you do steps in your workflow. 

This is also your first opportunity to customize the board to fit your team’s process. 

If your team regularly works with a different set of custom statuses or additional stages for research, development, or feedback, simply add more columns to represent those steps in your workflow. 

Pro tip: associating a color with each status will help add another visual layer of understanding to your board and every task—even at a glance. If you’re creating your Kanban board digitally with the help of project management software like ClickUp, custom statuses are automatically given a color to help members sort, filter, and organize their workload in a highly visual way. 

2. Tasks

This is where you fill in every task related to your project—yes, every single one. This is one of the ways Kanban boards promote transparency. 

Categorize tasks by their current status to get a clearer idea of your project’s overall status—how many tasks are yet to start, the number of tasks in progress, and the tasks you’ve completed. 

Tasks—or task cards—move across the board from left to right, starting in the To-Do status until they are completed and reach the Done column. 

Your columns will fill up fast, but you want your board to stay clean and clear for anyone to easily read at any time. When scanning your board, you’ll want to see all the basic task information including the name, assignees, due date, and image (if applicable).

Pro tip: if you’re using a flexible work management software like ClickUp, no need to pick and choose what task information you share! It does this for you. 😎

Load up your task with links, Custom Fields, Priorities, detailed descriptions, multiple assignees, watchers, and more to every task while keeping your board organized and presentable.

3. Work In Progress Limits

This is one of the key ways that Kanban boards maintain a consistent workflow. To keep members from juggling multiple tasks at one time, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits restrict the number of tasks that can move from To-Do to In Progress at one time.

4. Swimlanes

While columns add a vertical structure to your board, swimlanes divide the board horizontally to help you visualize multiple workflows on a single board. If you’re managing multiple projects or overseeing various team members, swimlanes create sections on your board to show which tasks belong to which team member or project.

If you’re a spreadsheet user, you can think of swimlanes as rows that contain just the tasks related to a specific category of information. 

Ta-da! 

Once you’ve added this information, your team is ready to spring into action using the Kanban approach! It sounds simple enough, but the drawback of creating your board from scratch is that each of these four steps requires a fair bit of forethought, time, and effort. Especially if you’re new to Kanban boards or are dealing with complicated workflows—it’s easy to forget key tasks and information.

But that’s not all. Without a template or flexible project management software, the maintenance involved in keeping your board up-to-date can hinder the project more than it helps you. 

This is why many project managers turn to templates as a plug-and-play solution to get started using Kanban boards as quickly as possible. 

ClickUp has entered the chat

While there are tons of templates floating around every Google search, not all Kanban boards are created equal. 

Since they have the power to optimize processes across departments and industries, it’s important to choose a template already tailored to your needs. This way, you can pull inspiration from the statuses and automations it provides and acts as a springboard for you and your team to take your Kanban approach even further. 

Our suggestion?

Choose a template created by and for a powerful work management software like ClickUp. Since your tasks, work, team, and process already exists within your Workspace, your Kanban boards will too! This not only saves you time when setting up your workflow, but helps move the process along on a board that stays automatically updated as you work. 

But the best part? It’s free! 💸

Access tons of Kanban board templates plus 100MB of storage, unlimited tasks and members, over 1,000 integrations, collaborative Docs, and so much more for free, forever in ClickUp! 🦄

Kanban Excel Template Overview

The number of tools available to manage agile projects exploded in the last few years. However, Excel remains one of the preferred project management tools. Make use of the Kanban Excel Template process in this post to organize your information and manage your projects efficiently.

I want you to accomplish three things by reading this post.

1. Understand how to setup a Kanban system for your team using the familiar features of Excel.
2. Learn the knowledge and master the tools needed to become a Kanban process Ninja.
3. Deliver results better than you ever have before

If you achieve these goals, you will have set yourself apart from the crowd as the go to person for project management and delivery.

The Kanban System

Start with a plan of how to organize your Kanban system. Every system will have some differences but three basic components make up every Kanban system.

1. Backlog
2. Kanban Board
3. Ceremonies

Let’s explore and plan each of these components.

The Kanban Backlog Template

The backlog houses all of the work that needs to be done. When you receive a request for new work, capture it as a User Story and place it on the Kanban backlog.

I’ve created an easy Excel Kanban Backlog Template you can use to get started.

Once you’ve captured a user story you must groom it. Grooming adds acceptance criteria that explain how to determine that the user story meets expectations. You also add level of effort estimates and the anticipated value of the user story during grooming.

After grooming, you sort the backlog according to value, most valuable first, which shows you which user stories to work on first. By working on user stories in order of value, your organization receives the highest possible return on investment of effort.

The Kanban Board Template

The Kanban board represents what most people think of when they think of Kanban. It stands at the center of all Kanban activities to communicate status consistently and accurately. The team gathers around the board daily to re-group and report.

Without an effective Kanban board your team will not succeed.

Physical boards work well for teams that reside in the same physical location. For those teams a white board, physical Kanban cards and sharpie markers work well. If you need a template for physical cards I’ve created an Excel Kanban Card Template that you can use for free.

Virtual boards work better for distributed teams.

Many virtual tools now compete for customers in the Kanban marketplace (Jira, Rally, Trello). They provide access to apps or websites to manage Kanban boards and come with a per user license fee. However, if you have simpler needs Excel delivers some powerful capabilities.

Instead, I recommend creating a virtual Kanban board with Excel and sharing it with your team via a common file server. This way, you are working with a familiar tool that doesn’t require a monthly fee per team member.

My Kanban Board for Excel template will let you get started creating your own board quickly.

The Ceremonies Template

Kanban ceremonies include grooming, stand up, demo and retrospective. These align with the ceremonies in most other agile methodologies. You will do well to define a template for conducting these ceremonies for your team.

The Grooming Ceremony

As discussed above, grooming accomplishes fully defining user stories in terms of acceptance criteria, level of effort and priority. Use the Excel Kanban Backlog Template for this kanban ceremony.

The Stand Up Ceremony

Gather your team every day, physically or virtually, to review the Kanban board, report on status and announce plans for the day ahead. The template for this ceremony consists of three questions.

1. What have you accomplished since the last stand up?
2. What will you accomplish before the next stand up?
3. Is there anything standing in your way?

The team should answer with quick, high level summaries. If anyone needs help the team should swarm into problem solving immediately after the stand up.

This focuses the team on keeping work moving and keeps progress on track.

The Demo Ceremony

You must demonstrate that all acceptance criteria of a user story function as requested before declaring a user story complete. This happens during the demo ceremony in Kanban.

Follow these steps to complete the demo ceremony for a user story.

1. Assemble the team and the user responsible for approving the user story.
2. Read the user story to the team.
3. Read each acceptance criteria and demonstrate that the functionality performs as requested.
4. Ask for approval of the user story from the approving user.
5. Consider the user story “Done”.

Typically, you batch multiple user stories into one Demo ceremony. Combine all user stories completed in the last one to two weeks into a single demo. This way you convene the approving users frequently enough to keep demos short but not so often that the demo meetings become frustrating.

The Retrospective Ceremony

Some teams refer to the Retrospective as a Post Mortem. In this ceremony you analyze the performance and outcome of the team over a given period of time typically referred to as a sprint. You identify what went well and what you want change going forward.

Do not point fingers! Look for root causes of problems and identify action items to eliminate them.

Praise positives! I recommend that you start the Retrospective asking for positive outcomes and speaking to why they benefited the team. This improves morale and gets the conversational momentum going.

The best template for this ceremony is a large flip chart or white board divided down the middle with positives on one side and things to change, or deltas, on the other.

Kanban Template Resources

I want to leave you with some additional resources that you can use to expand your Kanban knowledge and skills. These resources enable you to develop your own process templates and tools tailored specifically to the needs of your team.

Please note, some of the links to these resources are affiliate links. If you use them and make a purchase I do receive an affiliate commission. That being said, these are resources I use myself and feel will be useful to you as you seek to learn more about Kanban.

Kanban Books

Kanban by David J. Anderson is one of the first books I read when I began my investigation of Agile in general and Kanban specifically. It gives you a solid foundation of both theory and practice. Start with this book and you won’t go wrong.

The Goal by Eli Goldratt doesn’t name Kanban outright. However, it is the best book to introduce someone to the concepts of Agile and Kanban without drowning you in technical detail. It is a fictional narrative, a parable, that tells the story of how a manufacturing team changed their thinking and turned their business around. No agile library is complete without this book.