Action Plan & Kanban

Break a project or initiative into tasks you can check off, give each an owner and a date, and run it on a board that limits how much is in progress at once. You finish with a plan the team can follow this week and a board that shows what is stuck. An optional section adds a detailed action card for single tasks that need acceptance criteria and dependencies.

Evidence: kanban is a practitioner method with a growing but mostly descriptive literature (mixed). The reasoning behind a work limit is mathematical (Little's law, strong). Critical path scheduling is an established operations research technique (strong), though how organizations use it is little studied. SMART is a practitioner convention whose acronym has no empirical base. The starting size of the work limit below is a rule of thumb.

Use it when:

• You run a project, process improvement or initiative with several tasks and more than one person.
• Work is always "in progress" and little gets finished.
• You must show a sponsor or customer where things stand without a long meeting.
• Use the optional Action Card section when one task needs a definition of done, owner, dates and dependencies written down.

Skip it when:

• You need to zoom in on one task with acceptance criteria and dependencies: use the optional Action Card section below. Most teams need only the board.
• You do not yet have an agreed goal and scope: start with 8.5 Project Charter Template.

A kanban board claims that making work visible and limiting how much runs in parallel makes a team both faster and calmer. The practice descends from Toyota's production system (Sugimori, Kusunoki, Cho & Uchikawa, 1977) and was adapted for knowledge work by practitioners (Anderson, 2010); the evidence mostly reports benefits, so hold it as well-reasoned craft. The reasoning behind the limit is firmer: for a stable system, throughput, work in progress and cycle time are tied together mathematically (Little, 1961), so starting more work cannot speed anything up; it only stretches how long everything takes. The scheduling layer rests on established techniques: critical path planning (Kelley & Walker, 1959) and the bar chart tradition before it (Gantt, 1919).

That is why respecting the limit matters more than any other rule here: moving a card back to To Do is the board working, not failing. SMART tasks matter because a card nobody can check off never leaves In Progress. And your actual completion rate, not your hopes, should plan the next period.

Split the project into phases, then the main tasks in each phase. Three phases is usually enough; go deeper only inside the phase you are in now.

Strong answer: phases named for outcomes ("Venue and permits secured"), not for activity ("Planning"). Not: one phase called "Work".

Project, and target completion date:

Status: ☐ On track ☐ At risk ☐ Behind ☐ Complete

Illustrative example: the organization and the numbers are made up.

The coordinator of a regional food cooperative near Umeå prepares an autumn market with five volunteers. Her board has 15 cards In Progress, three finished a week. By Little's law (cycle time equals work in progress divided by throughput) a card takes about 15 ÷ 3 = 5 weeks from start to finish. With a limit of 6 and the same pace, it is about 2 weeks.

Step 3: she sets the limit at 6 and moves nine cards back to To Do.

Step 4: the critical path is permit, then stall layout, then printing the map. The permit is owned by the volunteer who is already over capacity, so she moves two of that volunteer's other cards.

Step 5: top priority: call the municipality about the permit on Tuesday. Blocked: the printer waits for the stall layout. Quick win: send the volunteer schedule.