Team Kanban Module Quick Wins – Visibility

Board Design: Reflect Your Process

Good visibility starts with good board design. Many organizations use templates (see more about templates in the Board Templates: Build Cross-Team Consistency section) to help their teams provide consistent and comparable information across groups. But, even if you have a template, it's important to first take the time to reflect on the steps in your process, since no team works exactly the same. Teams are more likely to stick with a board that makes sense to them and reflects their procedures.

Start increasing your team's visibility by visualizing the process as it is now, and make sure you know what you need to track: size of work activity, team members involved, scheduled dates, work type, etc. For example, some teams may need more than one type of backlog, depending on source, while other teams may need to add columns for approval processes and communication.

To design a board: 

1. Start with a template. See more about templates below.
2. Edit your board layout. This includes opening the board layout editor, configuring the board layout by adding, moving, and splitting lanes and sub-lanes, edit lane width, set a lane WIP limit, and more.
3. Share the board with the team, add cards, and visualize work as you move cards from left to right across the board. 
4. To View Board Health, press the H key on your keyboard to open the Board Health panel, which displays Bottlenecked lanes, Work in Progress (WIP), and Card Throughput.
5. Continuously improve your board by periodically conducting board reviews! 

Board Templates: Build Cross-Team Consistency

Templates can help teams get started faster. They minimize configuration by having pre-defined board layouts and settings and can also be used to build in organizational standards and best practices. This provides insight into progress and creates opportunities for better alignment.

Templates are only a suggested framework and can be modified to fit your specific team, while keeping parts of the template that are important to the larger organization. Don't know where to start? Here's a list of common templates.

To create a new board from available templates: 

1. Click , then Home. 
2. Click the Templates tab. 

3. Click a template, fill out the board creation form, then click Save. 

4. Edit your board layout to make it even more specific for your team. 

Board Levels: Facilitate Coordinated Planning and Delivery

Many organizations use different boards for different types of planning and work. Visibility into work is enhanced by using both high-level planning boards as well as team boards that track the delivery of work at a more granular level. These initiatives can be included at the team level to ensure work performed is aligned with corporate strategies. This also allows teams to work together on projects, yet stay within their own boards. Here are the important concepts for working with board levels:

• Parent board: A program board is a common example of a parent board, and may include larger deliverables at the team of teams or department level, with initiatives that map directly into the strategic initiatives used in Portfolios to perform investment and capacity planning.
• Child board: Team boards, for example, will often include the deliverables from their parent program board, broken into smaller features and stories that are completed by each team.
• Connected cards: The connection function allows related cards to be linked, whether on the same board or on a parent/child board. 
• Viewing connections: Click  or press C on your keyboard to see the connections. 
• Mirrored cards: The mirroring feature lets cards appear on two boards, so that initiatives and their data can be shared with the program and team level.

Cards on the Board: The Key to Visibility

The key to optimal Team Kanban visibility is to put all work on cards. You can't see work that's not on the board! This means not only work directly related to an initiative or program, but "lights on" or "business as usual" work, which all reflect team capacity.

Using the relevant card details that apply to a team's work is vital to not only seeing work, but knowing what's going on at a glance. While different options will work better for different teams, these are some important card features to use, and to use consistently:

• Card types: This is the quickest way to group types of work. The meaning of card types is easy to customize. A common differentiator is deliverables versus stories. Other common types are risks, ad-hoc work, and milestones.
• Headers: Headers make it easy to see and help differentiate work of similar types labeled by color into subtypes.
• Dates: It's important to use the planned start and finish dates for monitoring velocity and progress of work. Analytics make this easy to do. You may also want to Understand Actual Start and Actual Finish Dates. 
• Users: Without saying who is doing the work, capacity can't be addressed, so be sure to use the Assigned Users field!
• Tags: Tags are flexible tool to categorize types of work, where work originated, or any other helpful attribute you'd like to track and/or filter by.
• Connected cards: Connecting parent and child cards or cards with dependencies highly increases visibility into work being done. Connections can be easily displayed to visualize them.
• Comments: Easily track progress on work and can be used to communicate progress via @ mentions in comments.
• Tasks: Using tasks makes it easy to break down stories into components, and their progress is shown on cards.
• External links: No one wants to hunt around to find the work a card refers to, so use these links to allow access to work in progress or finished stories.
• Mirrored cards: Teams who are coordinating on work can stay on track by mirroring cards on each other's boards, plus this is a great way to keep higher-level initiatives visible on team-level boards.

All team members should use cards on a board the same way, but each board is managed separately, so cards could be managed differently on different boards.

Bottom line? You can really SEE what is going on with your work when it's on a card, as compared to an Excel spreadsheet or other way of looking at work.

Board Filters: Get Laser-Focused

Once you get all the structure set up for your boards and get information on all your boards, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. That's where filters come in handy. Do you only want to focus on one type of work? Filter by card type. Do you want to look at each team member's work separately during scrum? Filter by assigned user. Since every field on a card can be sorted by, and multiple selections can be made, the exact work you need to see becomes clear and you can focus on it and eliminate distractions. 

You can even save filters you use frequently, which makes managing work so much easier. This enables teams to quickly surface risks to plans resulting from cross-team dependency conflicts, blockers, and capacity constraints, and help drive proactive measures to enable teams to deliver on time.