Kanban Board is an Activity Center mode 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 Kanban 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 Workflow.

The default filter applied is 'No project selected'. As a result all activities are listed on the 'cards'.

When two or more projects are selected in the filter, the name of the project is shown at the top of the card for ease of reference.

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:

Enabling Kanban Board

To turn Kanban Board on, use these steps:

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

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 Workflow (top status = leftmost column, etc.).
• 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 (User Menu > Workflow). You can decide which columns to include in or exclude from the Kanban Board.

This setting is universal, i.e it is not customizable on a project to project basis.

To customize the Kanban columns:

1. Click the Settings button (see picture).
2. Use the mouse to leave selected only those columns you want visible on the board.
3. Click 'Apply'.

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 (see picture above) 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.)
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.

To start adding another activity inside the same project, hit Enter right after having typed the name of the activity being added.

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.

To show that an activity has a higher priority than others place it higher in the column.

If one column on the board is clearly more overpopulated with tasks than the others, there is an obvious need for additional resources in this stage of production.