Using Kanban Boards

Kanban is a popular method for identifying the status and priority of work items. You can use Kanban boards in Work Center to view your team's velocity, track work items, and avoid bottlenecks throughout the stages of a project. In general, the goal of a Kanban board is to help teams identify the status and priority of work items and track the overall progress of a project.

Kanban boards are populated with cards that represent work items from one or more feeds. You can use work item feeds, external data feeds, or a combination of both to populate your Kanban board with cards.

Each column on a Kanban board represents a different phase of a process. When you create your Kanban board, you define each column by mapping values from one or more status fields from the feeds that you add to the Kanban board view. You can also add sub-columns to represent more granular phases if necessary. When State field values from SBM items are mapped to Kanban columns, you can drag and drop cards between columns, effectively transitioning the item from one state to another.

Two types of Kanban boards are available:

My Kanban
The My Kanban board is a system view that is unique to each application. You cannot delete the default feed that is used in this view, but you can modify the settings if you have the Remove Administration privilege. See Managing System Views.
Custom Kanban Boards
You can create private Kanban boards or share them with other users. You can add work item feeds to views that are shared with you, but you cannot remove the feeds added by the creator or owner. For details, refer to Sharing Views.

Use cases:

Agile development
Kanban provides agile development teams a method for tracking features and sub-tasks in a release cycle. When an item from the backlog has been approved for development, it typically moves through various phases—Design, Development, QA, and finally Completion. Each phase of the cycle is represented by a column on the Kanban board. This enables a group or manager to view the overall progress of a release and the status of any given item in the release.
IT operations
IT departments can use Kanban to track any number of operational processes. An IT team member might define columns that represent phases of a project including Backlog, Analysis, Budget Allocation, Development, Testing, Production Rollout, and Done. Often a different Kanban board is created for each department that IT supports (Finance, HR, Business Intelligence, Marketing, and Development).
Departments outside of development
Kanban boards can help your legal, sales, HR, and marketing departments track their work as well. Your HR department can use a Kanban board to track the employee lifecycle with stages including Hired [Backlog], Onboarding, Current Employee, Offboarding, and Ex-employee, with sub-tasks in critical status areas like Onboarding and Offboarding. The Marketing team can use a Kanban board to track requests for campaigns or webinars to completion using basic stages (To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done), or create a board for a specific project like preparing for a trade show.

There are several departments and use cases that can benefit from using Kanban boards in Work Center. To learn more about creating Kanban boards, refer to the topics below.