Multiple projects on one Kanban Board

Question

Each of our clients has a separate project. We run all our dev work on a single Kanban. This doesn't seem like an unusual setup to me.

The new UI means it's difficult to even find the Kanban board. There are no menus, no navigation, no way to get to the Kanban from dashboards.

Now a board can only be associated with a single project. Seems like a poor design to me. Why hide them? Very frustrating.

Anyone have any ideas how to default the Kanban as the default screen on login? Or even make it one click away? Any other tips on how to effectively use Kanbans with this new UI?

Craig Storms · Answer

Fair enough. In my previous post I agreed that navigating the new Project/Board UI is convoluted and based on the number of projects you've got in your multi-project Kanban board that's understandably confusing. I have only 4 projects but what I see in navigating may be helpful to you. In my Project/Board implementation I have only 1 project that shows the Multi-Project Kanban board. My guess is you're in a similar situation - magnified by the huge number of projects linked to the board.

Assuming this is true ... if you find which project appears to be the 'owner' (by design or UI limitation bug) you can at least advise on how to get to the master board. First go to the 'owner' project and then select the board. Definitely a workaround not a true solution.

Good luck.

Björn Marksteiner · Answer

Thanks for the feedback.

We have 60+ projects grouped into 3 or 4 categories and filtered so I'm okay with the filters and working with the different projects within a single board.

My main problem is getting to the board in the first place from where-ever I am in Jira.

Using browser bookmarks seems a poor substitute for actually having navigation from within the software. We're an IT shop working on browser-based software so we all have dozens of browser user-profiles in a range of browsers and would have to bookmark in every one.

Craig Storms · Answer

Navigating between boards and projects is a bit awkward with the new UI, although generally I like most of the changes. I just use bookmarks to get to frequently used boards.

I have a multi-project Kanban board with swim lanes configured for each project. Setup is as Alexey explains with a filter that typically starts with "project in (XXX, YYY, ZZZ)" to pull in projects XXX, YYY, and ZZZ.

It seems that the project you start with becomes the 'owner' of the multi-project Kanban board which does affect navigation between different boards. Board Settings are configured from the '...' UI option on the board.