“Kanban” is the Japanese word for “Signboard”. Toyota introduced and refined the use of kanban in a relay system to standardize the flow of parts in their just-in-time production lines in the 1950s. If you work in services or technology, your work is often times invisible and intangible. A kanban board helps make your work visible so you can show it to others and keep everyone on the same page. In this blog, “Streamline Your Workflow with Jira Kanban Boards” you will learn how to optimize your workflow(s) using the Jira Kanban board.

Scrum and kanban are both agile practices/frameworks. They have evolved over the years to address specific challenges around organizing work. In a kanban work cycle, the team takes another thing up as soon as one thing finishes. Kanban is better suited for continuous work, such as support and services. Here, the work is mostly a daily routine that is a one-time effort with no frequent stakeholder engagement. There is no provision to planning in Kanban, but the team can use their own approach on a need basis. One more point to note is that there are no roles like product owner, developer, scrum master in Kanban.

However, a more complex, iterative work, like a new product or feature development may be better done with scrum. Scrum has sprints within which work is executed in a PDCA cycle. Scrum has active stakeholder and customer involvement — at least once a sprint during a sprint review event. There are specific events for planning the whole sprint and each day in the sprint. Also, there are roles like Product owner, Developer and Scrum master in scrum.

Now that we have some basic understanding of a Kanban work cycle, let us visualize Kanban workflow on a Jira Kanban Board.

Creating a new Kanban board

Jira SM or a service project by default manages issues via queues within each project. However, the Jira boards(KANBAN/SCRUM) can be created and housed only in a software project or in your own profile. There is an option to combine multiple boards ,i.e, either more than one service project or a service project(s) and a software project(s). In our example, let us consider that a single service project ticket(s) is to be displayed on our sample kanban board. You can easily create a board on Jira in any of the following ways.

  • From the sidebar, navigate to “Boards in scrum project” and click on the “Create board” option.
  • From the top menu of “Your work”, select the “Boards” tab and click on “View all boards”. In the next screen click on the “Create board” button at the top right.

When you click on the Create board button, a pop up will appear that will provide the option to select either a Scrum or Kanban board. Since we are creating Kanban board, click on “Create a Kanban board”. In the following screen, you will see several options. You will select the second option, “Board from an existing project,” as you link the existing service project to the Kanban board.

On the next screen, as shown below, specify the board name, the project(s) to link to the board, and the location to save the board. Once all the details are provided, click the Create board button to create your new Kanban board.

Setting up the Kanban board

The service project to be linked was already specified in the earlier step. In case you need to link additional project(s) after creating the board, you can do so by navigating to Configure board > General > Board filter followed by clicking on “Edit filter query”. In the next screen as shown below you can include or exclude any project and add conditions to other sections of the issue type. Our service project has issue types like [System]Incident, [System]Service Request, [System]Service Request with approvals, Task & Sub task.

Once the service project is added, we need to mirror the board columns with the service project ticket status(s). For this, you need to first confirm the statuses that will be used in your selected issue type workflow. A workflow can be used by multiple issue types in a project. In our scenario, we have considered that one issue type uses all the statuses of the workflow and another one uses it partially. Of the many statuses available in the workflow, our service request issue type uses specific statuses. These include Waiting for support, In progress, and Resolved/Cancelled.

Accordingly, let us setup the board with the columns by navigating to ellipsis>Configure board>Columns. Here you can set the name of the columns appropriately and move the status setting cards to the appropriate column. The Kanban board now automatically aligns service project tickets in various statuses to their respective columns on the board. You can set the minimum and maximum number of cards allowed in a specific column on the board.

Navigating on Kanban board

Our final board after integration with the service project will look as follows.

In order to better understand the status of the three tickets on the board, you can refer to the earlier workflow. The board maps the TODO status to the Waiting for support status, IN PROGRESS to the In progress/Pending/Waiting for customer/Escalated status. Lastly, the DONE status is mapped to Resolved/Cancelled statuses in the workflow. Each issue type can be specified a workflow on Jira. For our request type ticket (Emailed request) SR0, “In Progress” is the subsequent status to the current “Waiting for support” status.

To prioritize or group tickets on the board, right-click on the ticket and select the appropriate option to flag it for prioritization or label it for grouping. Click on the “Label” drop-down option at the top of the board to filter the group of tickets by the label name.

Just drag and drop the tickets from one column to another and the status of the tickets will change automatically in the service project too.

Further Reading: