Magic Board vs Kanban

Magic board versus Kanban had an interesting experience, I put out the magic board to my buddies, and two very different experiences.

One was like, Oh my God, of course, this totally makes sense.

I get it, I get it, I get it.

The other one was like, can we use Kanban?

And I'm like, You know what, Kanban is an interesting idea if you look at the history of it actually came out of the 1940s was developed for manufacturing plants.

And is extremely powerful.

It's been adapted into software, which is great.

But it assumes a couple of things.

It assumes that the work doesn't change very much like it's built for a manufacturing plant, they're not going to suddenly be able to add in new components very frequently.

And yet, in the knowledge economy working in the work that many of us do, things change all the time, client wants, this client wants that things have to adapt, something breaks, something changes.

And so, the idea of using Kanban has its create clearly had a lot of benefits.

But as you compare it to a magic board, there are a couple of interesting things.

Number one, Kanban, is going to move everything across the columns.

And so, as they move into the Done column, and if you've got 20 3040 done items, you now have a very long list of items squeezed into a relatively small amount of space.

And this is before you add in processes.

Now you could have your processes also as in your to-do doing and done, as well as all the results.

But this means you got three columns.

But now you have to colour code things or have some way of identifying what's the process, and what's the result, you set them up on magic board, you know where the processes are, they're always at the top, the process is always at the top.

This is very helpful.

But also with the magic board, instead of cramming all of the items into the done, and then having to look in there and pull out who's response was the due date, what's the link, it's all just their magic board, you've got the entire width of your screen to utilize for the information that is available for each of the processes.

And each of the results.

This is a significantly better use of screen space than if you have two columns that are largely not used.

As it goes along, there's going to either be a lot to do at the beginning.

And in the end, there's going to be a lot to the done.

But in between, yeah, kind of balanced.

But really, what Kanban is doing is giving you a visual representation of the status, has it not started, has it? Is it under work right now? Or is it done? They're the only three statuses that you can have in a kanban unless you're going to have a status for waiting and stock.

And suddenly, you've got 568 columns.

And it's really easy to lose track of what's going on.

And suddenly, the benefits of Kanban go right up into the magic board.

You don't use a column for status, you just have a status button.

Click the button.

What's the status? Oh, it hasn't started? What status are we working on? What's the status? It's done? What's the status, we're waiting. What's the status, it's stuck, it's very clear.

So instead of trumping up your real estate just to manage your status button, why not just have a status button?

A lot of modern project management systems will have a status button.

This is why people are choosing ClickUp people choosing Monday, Chick people are choosing Asana.

If your work is very static and rarely changes, then fine.

Go with Trello, go with Kanban board.

But if you live in a modern world where things change all the time, and you have to be able to adapt, and you have to be able to edit and improve, and you want to use all of the screen your real estate, then use the magic board design.

Alright, that's all I got for today.

Hope you're having an awesome day.

If you want more help around project management SOPs, how to set these up most effectively and how to build them so that you can free up your time and stop running your people to having them come and ask you what to do.

Then head over to Systemio.dev.

Alright, that's all I got for you today.

Look forward to seeing you soon.

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