Vertical & horizontal kanban

Having worked in food retail for some time, and having now been exposed to a project-based service setting, I’ve developed a somewhat unique perspective on project management.

Many project-based firms (IT/web/app development/marketing businesses) are familiar with ‘horizontal kanban,’ a scheduling system of using cards for tasks/projects that move from left to right based on priority and completion.

On the other hand, many food retail and other organizations (like surgeons) rely on a form of ‘vertical kanban’ (otherwise known as a checklist), to accomplish more or less the same thing.

I’ve found that it helps to use both frameworks for different types of assignments. 

Horizontal kanban is great for keeping people (and teams) accountable for high-level projects (made up of multiple tasks) as they move from backlog to active to QA to completion. Vertical kanban is good for visualizing those specific tasks (so that a single person knows what they need to focus on in a given day) as well as for for completing recurring tasks.

Most kanban-based software tools (Asana, Trello, etc.) have different displays for both these views. But I think it's important to keep in mind that certain things are better for different axis's: projects (not-including the subtasks that comprise them) are easy to keep track of horizontally, whereas tasks are easier to prioritize and thus complete by ranking them vertically. 

Just my 2 cents of PM wisdom.