Overview

Kanban Board is an Activity Center view for viewing and managing activities of one or more projects. It draws on the world renowned 'Kanban' technique developed by Toyota. In short, Kanban is a way to have an easy-to-handle 'cards-on-a-board' representation of your workflow which can be put to use for various purposes. It is found especially useful in such software and product development methodologies as Agile and Lean.

How Kanban works in Easy Projects

When you enable the Board mode, you see a Kanban board on which 'cards' representing its activities are distributed among various columns which in turn correspond to the statuses defined in the appropriate  workflow (see Workflows for details). How to select a workflow, see below.

Using drag-n-drop you move the cards from column to column (i.e. the activities from status to status), thus performing visual transition of a task, issue or request from one stage of work to the next. This can be treated as a 2D model of the project workflow. When an activity you are manipulating on the Kanban board lands in another column it is equivalent to its changing its status. If status change is set to be a notification event (edit task, request or issue event in a notification rule) it would trigger sending out notifications. See Email notifications. A priority rule apply: the higher a card is placed in a column the higher its priority is among the other cards in the same column. A fragment of a sample EP Kanban Board is shown in the picture:

Legend: 

1. Board mode selector
2. More actions button
3. Project filter
4. Workflow selector
5. Columns/statuses

Enabling Kanban board

To turn Kanban Board on, use these steps:

1. Open Activity Center.
2. Click the Board view tab.
3. Use the project filter (see the picture above) to select a project to place on the Kanban Board.

Workflow selector

Easy Projects will automatically detect which workflow is currently applied to the selected project.  If you have two or more projects visible on the Board and they employ different workflows, you can select which workflow you would like to use.  Please note that if the selected workflow is not compatible with one of the projects, no activities of the former will be visible on the Board. In this case, an info-button "Some statuses are hidden" can be seen next to the workflow selector. It is a sign for you that the selected workflow does not apply to one or more of the projects you have selected in the project filter. Hover the pointer over the info-button to make sure which project is affected: 

Customizing Kanban board columns

Every Easy Projects user can configure Kanban Board to its own liking, bar a few exceptions:

• The order of the columns is determined by the order of the statuses as listed in the selected workflow (top status = leftmost column, etc.). See Workflows for details.
• The column names match those of the statuses and cannot be changed independently of the latter.
• The set of columns applies to all projects, i.e. Project A will have the same assortment and order of columns as Project B, C, etc.

The columns/statuses available on the Kanban Board match those set in Workflow (Login Picture > System Lists > Workflow). You can decide which columns to include in or exclude from the Kanban Board.

Hiding/Unhiding columns

To hide a Kanban column:

1. Click the More actions button ().
2. Select Hide .

To unhide a column:

1. Scroll to the right.
2. Click + Status
3. Select a hidden status to show.

Opening activities on Kanban board

You can work with activities the same way you do in Activity Center.

To open the details of an activity:

1. Click the card representing the activity.
2. The activity details section will open the same way it does in Activity Center—on the right side of the screen. Now you can edit it the usual way.

Adding activities to Kanban board

You can add activities directly to Kanban Board. Here you have an additional bonus of quickly adding activities with the required status. You can also quickly assign people to it. Use the steps below:

1. Click the 'Add activity' button () under the column you want to add an activity to.
2. Select the project to create the activity within. (Applicable when two or more projects are selected for Kanban Board.) NOTE: The projects incompatible with the selected workflow are not available for selection (see Workflow Selector above).
3. Type the name of the activity and hit Tab or click elsewhere on the screen to save it. NOTE: Hitting Enter will result in adding another activity card.

4. Hover the mouse over the bottom left corner of the card just created for an 'Assign to' box to appear.
5. Click in the box and make a selection of assignees as you normally do in Activity Center.
6. To open the details of the newly created activity click on the name of the activity on the card.