Prevent users from ranking tasks in central Kanban Board

Question

Hi all,

I have a number of client projects with their own Kanban board that are managed by individual account managers, and a central Kanban board pulling in the tasks from these projects, where our then developers pick them up.

Currently when an account manager reorders tasks in the the individual projects, it also reorders them in my central Kanban board.

Is there a way I can order tasks in my central board independently of the various client projects? i'd like to be able to still order them myself manually rather than via due date etc.

Thanks in advance.

Walter Buggenhout · Accepted Answer

Hi @Connor Gamble,

Issue ranking runs across you entire Jira instance. Each issue is unique (it's only in the database once) and it has a unique ranking compared to all other issues.

That means that if someone changes the ranking of an issue, that will always have impact on other places where you see that same issue.

Also, the principle of manually ranking the issues is dependant on this same ranking system. Every kanban or scrum board must for that reason be ordered by rank in order to allow manual ranking of issues.

Having said that, there is no way to manually rank the same issues differently from different boards, simply because behind the scenes you are updating the same ranking each and every time (even though your board may only show a subset of all your Jira issues).

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

The rank is a global field, and your central board would be useless nonsense if it were to ignore it.

If you want a different ranking on some issues, that's fine, you can order boards by other fields, but that does mean that people will be working off different and independent ranking systems.  You could even add a second "rank" type field so you would be able to rank in the same way as you do with the standard ranking system.  If you were to do that though, you would need to educate every one that the central board is no longer telling you anything about the order that teams are planning to execute in, it would be useless as an overall view of everything, couldn't give the teams any indication of what the global organisation is thinking the order should be, and your teams would quickly learn to ignore it.