Free Kanban Board Templates: Excel, Google Sheets, PowerPoint, PDF & Word

Kanban board templates are project management tools used by Agile teams to maximize productivity. Use a Kanban board template to apply Kanban’s scheduling system and help your team visualize tasks that need to be completed on time. 

A Kanban board provides a structure for reviewing active project tasks, priority levels, and team member assignments. Project managers, Scrum masters, project sponsors, and Agile team members who use a Kanban board can easily see each task, the person responsible for completing it, and its current status. Use a Kanban board to lend structure to your Agile team’s development sprint cycles and to keep all stakeholders apprised of project progress. 

While Kanban board templates are customizable, they typically include at least the following four status columns, or swimlanes, depicting the linear progress of development tasks: 

• To Do: List all of your required tasks on individual Kanban cards, then assign team members to be responsible for each. Also include the effort each will take, either in points or work hours. 
• In Progress: Sometimes called Doing, this column indicates that the team members assigned to each task have begun work on them. 
• Review: Once each task is completed, a team member or manager should review it to verify that the work has been successfully completed.  
• Done: Also called Completed, this column indicates that a task has been reviewed and verified as completed. 

As Kanban templates often vary, some include the following stages-of-progress columns, depending on the nature of the project or the team’s process: 

• Backlog: Create a backlog of to-do tasks that, although they might not be included in the current sprint, will need to be completed at some point in the future. 
• Ready for Refinement: Place sprint or project tasks that need additional details before your team adopts them into this column. This way, it’s clear to team members and stakeholders that more information is required before a task can be pulled onto a sprint. 
• Verify: Similar to the Review column, you can apply a Verify Kanban stage in which a team member verifies a task. 
• In Test: Place Kanban cards in this status column to indicate that they’re currently being tested for accuracy. 
• Open: Use this Kanban board status option to indicate any items that are still open and need to be completed by sprint’s end. 
• Blocked: For any task that is blocked, place its Kanban card into this category to indicate that it needs to be unblocked to be successfully completed.