Creating a Kanban When Not All Users Have Skillset to Complete All To-do's

Question

I'd love to get some input/ideas from the group! I recently took over an eCommerce company that sells customized hand-drawn artwork. There are many different products and drawing styles, but not all of the 25+ artists can draw all the different styles.

The team already uses Trello but isn't using it like a Kanban, they manually assign work out to each artist, which then leads to issues when an artist gets behind, or when they get done with their work and more isn't assigned quickly enough. I want to have it so that artists pull in one drawing request at a time from the "To-do" list, without ending up in a situation where artists are cherry picking the easiest/best requests (we want them to work it FIFO).

How have you all solved for Kanbans when the people working the "To-do" queue don't have the skillset to do all of the cards that might be in the queue?

I appreciate your ideas and input!

milynnus · Answer

@Management Team

There is a option to assign member(artist) to a card sequentially or randomly. That might be usefully to minimise cherry picking. I think with automation you can have different list of members for different category of artists. Just need to work out something that can be use for your workplace. 
For more complex resource assignment strategies eg taking into availability, #assigned etc you would probably need to deploy some code into your automation via the http request action.

Michael Pryor · Answer

You could create different rules for different labels and the different rules could use different artists for the round robin.

So for example, you put your products A/C/F in as labels.  Then if the card has an A label, you run Rule 1 which uses a specific card (in your example, artist 1 and 2 would be on the card).

I think you are right though that it couldn't ALSO use the artists existing workload. (i.e. only assign if they don't have an existing task)

So it might not do exactly what you want, that's true.  Given the complicated nature of this kind of setup you might need a different kind of tool to do workload assignment.  There might be ways to do it in Jira: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/automatic-issue-assign-by-workload/qaq-p/760135

Management Team_dgk3x0 · Answer

That's really interesting and I'm wondering if we'd be able to use it, but based on the article it's not clear if we can create rules based on the skillset of the artist. 
For example it doesn't sound like we could say that Artist 1 is able to be in the line up for products A, C, and F, Artist 2 can be in the lineup for products A, B, and C, etc.  I'm also not sure that we could create a trigger based on the artists workload (when they complete the 1 artwork in their queue it would automatically assign another).