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Exploring Kanban as a Portfolio Overview Tool in Atlas: Seeking Creative Solutions

Marco Amicucci

Hello Atlas Community,

I'm new to Atlas and I've noticed there isn't a Kanban view for projects.

I'm aware of the conventional use of Kanban for individual project management. However, I find Kanban boards extremely useful for a holistic view of project portfolios. Despite understanding the typical perspective that Kanban may not be the ideal tool for this, I still see great value in it for overarching project visualization.

Is there any way to view projects in a Kanban format in Atlas?

I'm curious if there's a way to integrate a Kanban-style overview within Atlas, perhaps even through a Trello integration? I'm eager to hear any creative ideas or solutions that might help address this need for a comprehensive project portfolio view using Kanban. Any insights or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!

Comments

Andrej Freeze greenique

I think this was not implemented intentionally and I am glad, they do not exist here in Atlas.

Kanban boards ultimately have a positioning and therefore a prioritization within them. Soon after people will be calling out for synchronizations with Jira Statuses and priorities / ranks.

Next, one will need mandatory fields, WiP Limits, Swimlanes and workflows to ensure these fields are filled in the correct statuses.

Soon after, we will have two worlds, where everyone wonders, why two tools exist with the same functions, what their purpose is and why function A is only available in tool a, vice versa.

Ultimately I think Kanban Boards are great and super helpful, but they do not belong in Atlas. Instead, create and share your Jira Board, whichever edition of Jira you create them in.

Aaron Morris_49u8f7

Workaround: Atlas has a limited Jira integration. With it, you can link each Atlas project to a Jira epic (or higher in Jira Premium). Then, you can build a Kanban board of projects in Jira.

However, this workaround has (at least) two noteworthy limitations:

The link between Atlas and Jira is for visibility purposes only. So, you'll need to manually maintain project statuses in both systems. (But perhaps not a big deal if your project statuses won't change frequently.)
This strategy works much better in Jira Premium, which is more expensive. Jira Premium has an enhanced hierarchy feature which lets you create "projects" or "initiatives" that exist above the epic level. Personally, I've found this to be much more useful than linking Atlas projects to epics. (In my world, epics are a bit too low level to justify a representation in Atlas.)

Ivan Ferreira_31ou4g

I think you can do this by using Jira Product Discovery with the Atlas integration.

Then, create a board with State as Column and groupped by Atlas Project.

For this to work, you will have to create one Idea in Product Discovery for each Atlas Project and link them.