Overview
Board or Kanban is an Activity center view for viewing and managing activities of one or more projects. 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.
Working with Board
When you enable the Board mode, you see a Kanban board on which cards representing activities are distributed among various columns which in turn correspond to the statuses defined in the appropriate workflow (see Workflows for details).
Note
The default filter applied is "No project selected". As a result, all activities are listed on the cards.
Note
When two or more projects are selected in the filter, a project's name 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 a visual transition of a task, issue, or request from one stage of work to the next.
If the 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.
A priority rule applies: the higher a card is placed in a column the higher its priority is among the other cards in the same column.
Enabling Board
To turn Board on, use these steps:
- Open Activity center.
- Click the Board view tab.
- Use the project filter (see the picture above) to select a project to place on the Board.
Workflow selector
Birdview will automatically detect which workflow is currently applied to the selected project. If you have two or more projects visible on the Board and they employ different workflows, you can select which workflow you would like to use.
Note
If the selected workflow is not compatible with one of the projects, no activities of the former will be visible on the Board.
In this case, an info-button "Some statuses are hidden" can be seen next to the workflow selector. It is a sign for you that the selected workflow does not apply to one or more of the projects you have selected in the project filter.
Customizing columns
Every Birdview user can configure Board to their own preferences, bar a few exceptions:
- The order of the columns is determined by the order of the statuses as listed in the selected workflow (top status = leftmost column, etc.). See Workflows for details.
- 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 Board match those set in Workflow (Company settings > Workflows). You can decide which columns to include in or exclude from the Board.
Warning
This setting is universal, i.e. it is not customizable on a project-to-project basis.
Hiding columns
To hide a column:
- Click .
- Select "Hide".
To unhide a column:
- Scroll to the right.
- Click "+ Status".
- Select a hidden status to show.
Opening activities
You can work with activities the same way you do in the Activity center. To open the details of an activity:
- Click the card representing the activity.
- The activity details section will open the same way it does in the Activity center - on the right side of the screen. Now you can edit it the usual way.
Adding activities
You can add activities directly to a Board. Here you have an additional bonus of quickly adding activities with the required status. You can also quickly assign people to it. Follow the next steps to do it:
- Click the "Add activity" button under the column you want to add an activity to.
- Select the project to create the activity within. Note that the projects incompatible with the selected workflow are not available for selection (see Workflow selector above).
- Type the name of the activity and click "Tab" or click elsewhere on the screen to save it.
Tip
To start adding another activity inside the same project, click "Enter" right after having typed the name of the activity being added.
- Hover the mouse over the bottom left corner of the card just created for an "Assign to" box to appear.
- Click in the box and make a selection of assignees as you normally do in the Activity center.
- To open the details of a newly created activity click on the name of the activity on the card.
Tip
To show that an activity has a higher priority than others place it higher in the column.