How It Works: Kanban+Timeline

If you’re using Kanban board as a process tool in software development, you must know that Kanban is mainly about letting the work flow through the production states.

Pull some work from backlog, get it through the pipeline and on it goes.

Kanban is great, but it desperately lacks one thing which matters a lot in this world plagued by time constraints. This thing is called a sense of time. If a team does some cross-project work, as they pull smaller items from a support requests backlog, they will likely want to be informed not only of a current state of a work item. They will want to know when it is safe to assume that this work item will be done, or passed over to another department, etc. Trying a workaround to include this sense of time to a physical Kanban board on a wall might be a cumbersome task. Take a look:

This board has a mention of a milestone, Nov 9. The stickers are to-do items. This workaround just informs of a fixed milestone, and doesn’t take the production dynamics into account. There’s no way to give a forecast from this board, if the team will complete whatever their work is by November 9, judging by the pace with which they progress. Not to mention that there’s no way to see at which pace are they progressing. There are some Kanban reports that can help predict that, but they will not be available in a whiteboard, obviously. This might work for this team, but some other hypothetical team will want their Kanban board tailored to their time-sensitive objectives in a different way. And they would need to sweat and invent specific workarounds, if they need more than just a date written on a board.

We’ve always wanted to help our brothers sweat less at work 🙂 .. and we’ve been well aware of this need, that timelines should be somehow intertwined with Kanban boards. The project management tool that we develop supports Kanban along with other dev processes, and our on-going goal is to make the tool still more convenient. That’s why we’ve implemented timelines that can now be used in combination with a digital Kanban board.  We used to have a paper timeline on the wall, too, but this visual roadmap is more of a thing that creates the spirit of common purpose, than a hands-on tool. The Kanban+timelines combination can be used to see how teams are doing with their work, and in what time they expect to complete it. That’s how this Kanban+timeline board might look (click to enlarge):

There are two projects on this board, and there’s a backlog for each of them. Alternatively, there can be a shared backlog (our tool supports that as well). What goes next are work items laid over a stretch of time. Where the strips end is the current forecast for “Done”.  The timeline can accompany the traditional Open-In Progress states on a Kanban board as well, if that’s what someone needs. Again, no sweat here, one can quickly set up a custom timeline+Kanban combination in our tool.

Having a timeline available as another option on top, or instead of a Kanban board, helps make sense of what’s going on with the projects in less time, pun intended. Besides, timelines keep the sense of time always present with a team (which they might be missing if they only look at a plain Kanban board). It surely is less hassle to maintain the digital Kanban+timeline board, and any stakeholder who is not immediately involved with the team’s work will quickly get an idea of what’s going on with the projects. There’s no limit to this digital timeline, and as to how it can be fit into a screen. Just make sure your screen is big enough for it 🙂 For smaller screens, the scroller — at the bottom right on the screen above — will navigate you through unlimited sands of time.

It looks to me that adding a timeline to Kanban board is more of a burning need, than a luxury. If you want to try timelines combined with the Kanban board, click on the circle on the right.