Task-board appearance: Two statuses in column?

[Will Yates]

Hello

Where I work tasks can have the following statuses (that the end-users see):

To Do, In Progress, Done, and something of a joker in the form of "On Hold". As you are probably familiar with issues ideally flow from left to right, going from To Do -> In Progress -> Done. However On Hold really breaks the flow. See this picture of our board:

http://i.imgur.com/jV6RM1k.png

I don't see a problem-free place for the "On Hold"-column. Tasks may "jump" back and forth, left and right, wherever you'd place it.

The solution I can think of is to have "In Progress" and "On Hold" share the same vertical space, as described in this sketch:

http://i.imgur.com/zVn5cNh.png

Can the above appearance be configured?

[Peter Van de Voorde]

Hi Will,

You could try the following trick with swimlanes :

1. Go to the configuration section of your board (select the configure option next to the cog on the right top side of the board).
2. Go to the columns tab and move your In Progress status and your On Hold status into the In Progress column.
3. Go to the swimlanes tab and select Base Swimlans on Queries.
4. Create 2 swimlanes called On Hold and In Progressand give them the following queries:
   1. On Hold swimlane : status = "On Hold"
   2. In Progress swimlane : status = "In Progress"

You should now have an overview of your board with your on hold issues clearly visible in a seperate swimlane, it's not exactly what you want but it comes close.

Best regards,

Peter

[Ioannis Tzanakis]

Hi all,

I can now see why the original request from this thread is valid on a Kanban board.

When a story is "In Progress" and an impediment get on the way, it would make sense to move it to "On Hold" status, as it has been already started and not back to "To Do".

Column:                          To do        |        In progress

Status: Selected for development   |   in progress | On Hold

The issue here with the "On Hold" status in the "In progress" swimlane is the WIP limit, as we cannot apply it explicitly on a Status but only on the entire swimlane.

Any recommendation by anybody in regards?

Thank you very much in advance,

Ioannis

[Jean Spencer-Young]

For me this is more about being able to replicate the same status in multiple columns. I want to have my columns follow the workflow e.g. To Do - In Planning - In Design - In Consultation - In Implementation - Done

But within each of Planning, Design, Consultation and Implementation I want to be able to have the status as "In Progress", "Awaiting Review", "In review", "Blocked", "On Hold". The only alternative is to have different boards for each of Planning, Design, Consultation and Implementation Phases but that doesn't work for the team as different workstreams are at different stages of the workflow at different times and we need a Kanban that shows the view across all workstreams instead of four separate boards.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>replicate the same status in multiple columns

This makes boards complete nonsense because a board is supposed to show you where an issue is in your process.  If you have the same status in a board twice or more, your issue will appear twice or more hence you can't tell. 

When a user looks at an issue, they need to be able to see that it is (say) "in review".  If you've got "in review" in two columns, then when they ask you "my issue is "in review", what does that mean?", you can't tell them.  Because you have no way to know if they're talking about "in review" or "in review"

[Carolina Gómez]

I want the same thing but instead of having 2 status one below to another I want both to be one next to the other.

Example:

Column

Status 1 | Status 2

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you want that, why not just have two columns?

[Carolina Gómez]

I just want one "In progress" column. The reason is that an issue that is not on the test server (Ready to test) is a issue "In progress". The dev team asked for a column to move the tasks that have been completed in their machines but they haven`t pushed it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sounds like 2 columns! Actually, I'd consider two boards. One for Dev, one for test. Different views.

[Justin Alex Paramanandan]

I believe that additional columns can't be added on top of an existing one, Will.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Task Board meant to have the columns adjacent to each other in the flow you've mentioned:

To Do > In Progress > Done

But if there are any issues/impediments along the In Progress column, you would add them to the On Hold? Unless your use case is a bit different.