Kanban shows which tasks are currently in progress and limits how many may be open at the same time. For agencies, one thing in particular determines its success: how you name the columns on your board. If you use separate columns for waiting stages such as ‘Client approval’ or the re-briefing phase, you can finally see where projects are really getting stuck.
[.no-toc]What is Kanban?[.no-toc]
Kanban is an agile method for visualising tasks that are currently in progress. Each task is recorded on a Kanban card and assigned to a column based on its status. This lets you see at a glance which process stage each task has reached. It also reveals when a large number of tasks are in progress, waiting for feedback or blocked.
That is essentially all there is to the theory, because the board serves exactly two purposes: it shows the status of every individual task at all times, and it makes clear when too much work is open at once.
The second point is the more important one, and it has its own name: the WIP limit (work in progress) specifies the maximum number of cards that may be in a column at the same time. Once the limit has been reached, no new task is started until another one has been completed. However, this is exactly where most boards stop halfway, because a board without limits is ultimately nothing more than a to-do list divided into columns.Everything else about Kanban is not theory but application, and that is precisely where it becomes interesting for agencies.
What benefits does Kanban offer agencies?
[.toc-name]Benefits for agencies[.toc-name]
In short: Kanban reduces lead times, highlights bottlenecks early and replaces a large part of the weekly status meeting with a glance at the board. The greatest benefit for agencies is that waiting times involving clients and freelancers become measurable, rather than being perceived within the team as supposed slowness.
These benefits make a real difference in day-to-day agency work:
- Fewer parallel workstreams and therefore shorter lead times.
If a team has 25 tasks open at the same time and completes five of them per week, each individual task takes an average of five weeks. If the same team reduces its parallel work to twelve tasks, the average falls to around 2.4 weeks without anyone having to work faster. The team simply starts fewer things at once.
- Bottlenecks become visible before a deadline is missed.
If cards pile up in one column, that is where the bottleneck lies, and you can see it on the board far earlier than at the next regular project meeting.
- Waiting times become measurable and therefore negotiable.
If you can demonstrate that approvals from a particular client take an average of nine days, you have a concrete argument for the next retainer discussion rather than a vague gut feeling.
- Status updates are available without anyone having to ask.
Anyone who wants to know where a project stands can look at the board instead of checking with everyone on the team. In an agency with 30 people, that adds up to several hours of coordination every week.
- There is no need for a change project to get started.
You begin with the process you already follow today and only change individual columns when you notice that tasks repeatedly get stuck at a particular point.
- Onboarding becomes much easier.
New team members and freelancers understand your process by looking at the board, whereas experience shows that nobody reads a fully written-out process document.
[.b-testimonial]Good work organisation creates the conditions for teams to enjoy their work and be effective, putting less energy into planning chaos and more into ideas and collaboration.[.b-testimonial]
How should you name Kanban columns to match your agency workflow?
[.toc-name]Naming columns[.toc-name]
The standard columns ‘To-do, In progress, Done’ do not suit any agency because they conceal the crucial steps.
Instead, name the columns after how your project actually progresses and give every waiting stage its own column, whether that is client approval, the re-briefing phase or waiting for assets. Only then will your board show what is really happening.
In awork, the columns on your board represent the task statuses of a project. You create them directly on the board, name them however you like, select a colour and icon for each one and arrange them in the correct order using drag and drop. This means you adapt the board to your process, not your process to a prescribed board.
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Four board setups from everyday agency work
1. Creative and design project:
Briefing outstanding → Concept → Design → Internal approval → Client approval → Re-briefing → Finalisation → Done
2. Content or social retainer:
Topic pool → Editorial → Copy-editing → Client approval → Scheduled → Published
3. Web and development project:
Ready for Dev → In development → Code review → Client acceptance → Waiting for assets → Live
4. New business and pitches:
Enquiry → Qualified → Pitch in progress → With client → Won → Follow up
The columns shown in bold are the ones that really matter, because they do not describe work but waiting stages, and that is exactly where agency work spends most of its lead time. As long as client approval is included within the ‘In progress’ column, your board makes it look as though the team is slow. As soon as it gets its own column, the board shows the actual situation: four cards have been waiting for a response for eleven days.
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Five rules for naming columns
- Name states rather than activities, because ‘With client’ describes the situation more precisely than the generic ‘Coordination’.
- Give every waiting situation its own column, because ‘Waiting for internal approval’ and ‘Waiting for client assets’ are two different problems with two different solutions.
- The re-briefing phase absolutely belongs on the board, because incorporating feedback is real work that takes real effort. If you hide this step, you will fail to account for it in your next proposal as well.
- Use colours as signals by giving all waiting columns one colour and all active work stages another. That way, a single glance is enough to see how much work is genuinely in progress.
- Keep the board to five to seven columns, because fewer columns make waiting times invisible again, while more make the board difficult to read. An additional column is only worthwhile if cards genuinely get stuck at that point.
Once a setup works well, you can save it as a project template in awork. Every new client project will then automatically start with the exact board already proven for that type of project.
How can grouping by lists and users help you maintain an overview?
[.toc-name]Grouping & overview[.toc-name]
A board with 80 cards is no help to anyone. That is why you can group the same board in awork by task lists or by users, giving you two completely different views of the same tasks: one focused on project progress and one on distribution across the team.
When grouped by task lists, the board is divided into rows for each project phase, discipline or client, so you can immediately see whether work is piling up in one phase while another has nothing going on. For project leads, this is usually the most useful view in the weekly meeting because it shows where progress is currently being held up.
When grouped by users, each person gets their own row, and within seconds you can see who has five cards in delivery and who has only two. It is particularly useful that you can reassign tasks directly in this view using drag and drop, simply by moving a card into another person's row.
Three other actions keep the board useful in day-to-day work:
- Sort cards within a column so that the most important task is always at the top. This removes much of the prioritisation discussion from the meeting.
- Use presentation mode for the weekly meeting, in which the board switches to a reading view and hides all unnecessary elements. This turns the board itself into the agenda.
- Automate recurring steps by letting awork handle status changes, assignments and notifications. The less maintenance the board requires, the more up to date the cards will be.
An honest note on WIP limits: awork does not technically enforce them for each column. In practice, you therefore agree the limit as a team rule and make it visible in the column name, for example ‘In delivery, max. 6’.
You can then check whether reality matches the rule in capacity planning, where the more reliable figure is available anyway: actual availability in hours, including working hours, meetings, holidays and other projects, rather than simply a number of cards.
Because time tracking in awork is linked directly to the card, every movement between columns also becomes budget information rather than merely a status update.
And with awork Connect, clients and freelancers can collaborate on the project free of charge, so feedback is attached to the relevant card instead of being buried in an email thread. That is what makes a column such as ‘Client approval’ genuinely useful in the first place.
What is the best Kanban tool for agencies?
[.toc-name]Kanban tools at a glance[.toc-name]
[.b-button-primary]Try Kanban in awork[.b-button-primary]
The real difference rarely lies in the board itself, but in what happens alongside it. A board shows status, but it does not show whether a project is profitable.
Of the tools mentioned, awork is the only one developed specifically for agencies and therefore includes time, budget, utilisation and external collaboration without the need for an additional tool, hosted on servers in Germany.
You can find the full comparison with all criteria here: Project management software for agencies: 7 tools compared.
[.no-toc]Conclusion[.no-toc]
Kanban can be introduced in ten minutes, and that is exactly why it so often stops halfway. The board is there, the cards move, yet nothing gets finished because the columns do not match the real process and nobody has agreed a limit. Both can be addressed within an hour, transforming everyday project work from then on.
Your checklist for a Kanban board that genuinely works:
- The columns are named after your real process rather than ‘To-do, In progress, Done’
- Every waiting stage has its own column, including client approval
- The re-briefing phase appears on the board as a separate step
- There are five to seven columns, with waiting columns set apart by colour
- A WIP limit has been agreed for every active column and is visible in the column name
- The board has been viewed once by task lists and once by users
- The finished setup has been saved as a project template so the next project starts the same way
👉 A board makes work visible, but only appropriately named columns make it manageable.
[.no-toc]FAQ[.no-toc]
Kanban or Scrum: which is better suited to agencies?
Kanban fits around the process you already have, whereas Scrum introduces fixed sprints, defined roles and regular meetings. For agencies handling many spontaneous client requests, Kanban is usually the more realistic starting point because Scrum assumes that an ongoing sprint will not be disrupted. You can find out more in the guide to agile project management.
Does every client project need its own board?
Yes, one board per project makes sense because the process stages vary depending on the type of project, and a shared board would blur those differences. To gain a view across all projects, however, you need a level above this: a multi-project overview and capacity planning, because a single board can never show the entire portfolio.
How many columns are too many?
From around eight columns onwards, a board becomes cluttered without becoming any more informative. If you feel that you need more, one phase has usually been divided too finely. In that case, it is better to consolidate it and create the required level of detail by grouping tasks into task lists instead.
Can Kanban also represent retainer work?
Kanban is particularly well suited to retainers because new work comes in continuously, which is exactly what the method is designed for. One board per retainer client with a topic pool, delivery, client approval and publication is sufficient in most cases. The number of tasks completed each month then shows whether the agreed package of hours matches the actual volume.
Will AI take over board maintenance in future?
To some extent, this is already happening: awork AI can handle status changes, assignment suggestions and risk alerts because it works with plans, times, skills and utilisation. The crucial factor is not the model but the context: as long as project data, time tracking and availability are held in separate systems, all recommendations remain guesswork.
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