How do you use Kanban? How do you prioritise items on a Kanban board? What is the criteria for items to make it to the board? How do you release finished tickets? How does your Kanban process fit with the team's calendar in terms of frequency of releases, standups, meetings ... etc?
I know this isn't what you're asking, but I want to give a shout-out to personal kanban. My husband and I use a post-it+whiteboard Kanban board at home for household/personal tasks, and it revolutionized our life. We have five categories: Backlog, To do, In progress, Blocked, and Done.<p>We jokingly do retros every couple weeks to clear everything off the Done column and give each other feedback like "I really like how you insulated those pipes, keep it up!" The retros are completely unnecessary (except for fun), but the kanban board is life-changing: we don't have to nag each other anymore, because you can just look at the board to see what's queued up to get done. It completely eliminated a lot of unnecessary friction between us.
If you use Asana, or are thinking of using it, the Board view allows you to implement Kanban. Asana use was pretty low before I started at my job, but once I introduced Board view + Kanban, adoption increased significantly.<p>A couple specific tips:<p>* Use a backlog/ideas/to do eventually column to store tasks whose time has not come. It's a great place to brain dump
* Make tasks bite-sized with actionable titles. More tasks completed = more dopamine hits = higher adoption = better tracking
* Review open tasks with your direct reports regularly. I do 1x/week
We have 4 columns:<p>* Proposed
* ToDo
* In Progress
* Done<p>As a developer we mostly care about all but the first (though we drop random stuff in the first). The ToDo is always ordered with respect to priority but is generally irrelevant while one has work in-flight. That allows us to, without having to really notice, always grab the most important thing when we are free again.<p>As you can imagine the proposed is the ungroomed/vague/random idea list that is roughly ordered toward whatever the PO (or developers for us since we don’t have product) views as a road map - discussed every week or so.<p>Everything has labels and generally ties to the concept of an epic or bug.
It totally depends on the team and work. We apply Scrum or Kanban separately. For example Ops team almost exclusively executes Kanban method, yet Dev teams probably use Scrum.<p>For the columns on Jira: we have 4 - 5 columns; Backlog - To Do - In Progress - Blocked - Testing(sometimes) - Done. I do believe this is more than plenty, although in some customers I have consulted to might have ~10 columns which some of them reads like code review, test on staging, test on prod.<p>Ticket scoping is the most important thing if you want to execute a Kanban/Scrum method. It shouldn't be too broad (i.e. fix all the bugs) or it shouldn't be too focused (i.e. write tests for this function). Each story/ticket must be an independent deployable feature or function written with a business level understanding with clear acceptance criteria. <i>Clear acceptance criteria in bullet point form is very important!</i> (repeated for emphasis)<p>Backlog is prioritized by business value and urgency, and transferred to the To Do column by a business/product owner or a PM to make sure no one is ticket-starved.<p>Depending on your work or infrastructure capability, you can release each ticket as a separate deployment or you can create weekly or bi-weekly release packages that are well tested on a staging environment. Any code change that has stayed unreleased more than 2 weeks probably needs a fresh look.
We use Kanban for several departments because our Tool Zenkit is not only a Kanban Board. You can work with multiple data views, for example, a Calendar.
In Marketing, we use it for task management. Prioritization can be used via due dates, the order of the items or by setting labels with "high", "medium" or "low". We add almost everything to the board to have a good overview of the workload or we add checklists to an item where we can see what to do within this task.<p>Everyone can move his items to "Done" and I get informed or we use the column "need confirmation" to check if the task is all done. And with the Calendar view, a team calendar isn´t a problem anymore.<p>More Infos about Zenkit: <a href="https://zenkit.com" rel="nofollow">https://zenkit.com</a>
At the risk of....<p>We use it to work out when inventory needs moving and re-ordering...<p>I know it means 'coloured badge' so I can see why it could describe post-it notes, but since it is so well understood to mean 'when inventory levels get to the (usually virtual) coloured badge, trigger a re-plenishment,' in the Toyota manufacturing method I still (as a multidisciplinary person) find its use in PM really annoying. Especially as the Toyota method is so ubiquitous in inventory control. Two entirely different uses for the same esoteric word.<p>I use Trello by the way, but I much prefer the real post-it board if your team is in one place. Todo》Doing》Done for me. For certain workflows a QA stage is helpful
We use Github’s projects AKA kanban. It’s nice to tie in directly to the repository features sure as milestones, labels, pull requests, issues, etc.<p>We have a board per platform. All boards have the same 5 columns:<p>Backlog - not in current sprint but can be added if spent complete
Current Sprint - can be picked up by anyone if not assigned
In progress - someone working on it
Testing - Completed issues / pull requests that get assigned to a coworker to review
Done - once reviewed moved here
If you need a personal Kanban tool that integrates with Google Tasks & GMail, check out Kanbanly: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kanbanly/oinopeelpidbddmdhhllmpifaohjdkom" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kanbanly/oinopeelp...</a>
Our team uses Kanban just as a way to keep track of all the tasks we have and see what anyone of us is working at a given time. It's then up to the project manager to distill that info and distribute it to whoever needs to know. As a developer, I don't do anything but switch what I'm working on
We use different Trello Boards for different projects.<p>We use it in very minimalistic way:<p>3 Lists - To Do, Doing, Done.<p>I manage projects so I add tickets and tag the person who has to do it.<p>If needed I add due date.<p>I put a watch on 'Done' list and once something is there I review it out.