What Is a Kanban Board?

A Kanban board is a visual way to manage work. You set up columns for the stages work moves through (something like To Do, In Progress, and Done) and each piece of work is a card that moves left to right as it progresses. One glance tells you what’s in flight, what’s stuck, and where the pile-ups are.

The idea came out of lean manufacturing, but it translates cleanly to project work, where “What’s the status of everything?” is a question managers ask all day.

Why Use a Kanban Board for Project Management?

Kanban’s strength is that it makes flow visible. Because every item is a card in a column, bottlenecks show up as columns that get crowded, and stalled work is obvious rather than buried in a list. It’s also easy for a whole team to read without training, which makes stand-ups and status updates faster.

It suits work that moves through clear stages and where priorities shift often, you reorder cards instead of rewriting a plan.

The Salesforce Kanban View

Salesforce includes a built-in Kanban view that turns records like opportunities or cases into cards you can drag between columns, usually based on a status field. It’s handy for pipelines, but it works on standard Salesforce records rather than a full project structure, so on its own it isn’t a project management board.

Kanban Boards With Cloud Coach

Cloud Coach brings Kanban to project management on Salesforce, so you can manage project tasks and work items as cards on a board, not just opportunities in a pipeline. Because it’s native to the platform, the board reflects the same project data as your Gantt view, resourcing, and reporting, so moving a card updates the project, not a separate copy of it.