Control other projects' user stories from a different kanban board.

Johnny47

We have a design team that is working with 6 other teams as a shared service.

The design team, needs to be able to see and control the state of the stories in the other 6 backlogs. We've done that much (tag stories as "design", so that they appear in Design team's board).

What we've found is that these stories inherit their parent boards' workflow states, so in the design team's kanban board, when we move a story, depending on its workflow steps, the appropriate steps are shown on the board under "In Progress".

Are there any best practices for working in this fashion?

The aim here is for the design team to control stories found in other backlogs, to avoid creating their own stories.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

The best practice is quite simple - make sure your people understand what they are looking at and how it works.

A board is a view of a set of issues, not a container.  Anything you do to an issue in one board updates the issue, including workflow actions (workflows are executed by issues in projects, not the boards), and hence all the other views (boards) will show that change, although they may need refreshing to pick it up.

You will benefit from documenting everyone's process, so that a person can see what other teams do and where they fit in.

It is well worth getting all the stakeholders together to discuss the use of status - you want them to agree on a clear list across all the teams who may be sharing, as you don't want things like status of "to do" and "to-do" in a flow.  Rename them to be clear - "waiting for dev assessment" and "waiting for test" (clunky, but clear)