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How to use the Kanban board?
How to use the Kanban board?

Understand when and how to use the Kanban board

Claudette Albers-Reid avatar
Written by Claudette Albers-Reid
Updated over a week ago

The Kanban board is not for everyone's use. For some projects, the project board (previously known as the task board) is sufficient for identifying tasks required, ticking them off as you go and registering hours against those tasks. Kanban boards are typically applied for agile project management such as software development, engineering and product development, support teams, QA teams and portfolios.

Open the task board either from your project or choose from the main menu Tasks and Boards.

Select the desired task board to display the contents of the task board. The task board will appear under the new PROJECT BOARD sub-menu:

The above task lists contain tasks, where team members are assigned, start and end dates are set and they're all on the status To do. This task board is a visualization of all tasks needed to be completed. However, it does not visualize the progress of these tasks in the workflow to identify any bottlenecks that puts your project at risk.

The Kanban board will provide you with that visualization.

Note: Do not confuse the use of the task board filters (Show to do; Show in progress and Show completed). These filters will only filter on the status of the tasks. You will not see the overall workflow where to-do tasks outweigh tasks in progress:

Click on the KANBAN BOARD sub menu:

From the screenshot above, the three tasks appear in the To do Kanban column (lane). By default, the Kanban consists of two other lanes, Work in progress and Done. In the above example, you can see that a Review lane has been added.

To create additional lanes, in the main menu bar, click the gear icon and choose from the menu Project settings. Scroll to the end of the settings page to the Kanban lanes:

The default lanes are displayed:

Click the Add lane button. The following dialog box appears:

The Order of the lanes are sequential. In the Name field, enter the name for the new lane. The Change status to field is optional where you can define the status of task when you change lane. For example, if a task requires a Review and it's completed, the task can be dragged to the Done lane and the task status is marked as Completed.

Note: Best practice for numbering the lanes is to group them in 10s, so that other lanes can be added in between, should it be needed.

Click Save.

As tasks are worked on, team members can move tasks to the desired lane to highlight the project's progress and whether there are tasks putting the project at risk:

Important: The Kanban board lane settings are applied across the organization. If you are using multi-organizations, each organization can apply it's own Kanban settings.

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