Workload in Kanban

[Nauman Sohail]

What is the ideal number of tasks to be in the "In Progress" status/column in the Kanban board? 

How to handle priority/urgent tickets to be handled and moved to In Progress status?

[Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nauman Sohail and welcome to the Community!

that question isn't easily answered in a few sentences. Are you actually working with the Kanban Method or are you simply using the Board as Visualisation? How big is your team? What statuses are you using - if you're waiting for something, do you change the status? Are you sharing issues or is everyone working on "theirs"?

All these things will influence on how you want to set the limits.

I found this article quite helpful for a general overview: The Ultimate Guide to WIP Limits in Kanban (businessmap.io)

In regard to urgent issues: the WIP Limit is never set in stone. You'll be able to move issues to the WIP Column even if it exceeds a limit. The team should then decide on which other issues will be moved back to the starting column instead.

[Nauman Sohail]

Thanks a lot @Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) - that was really helpful. I did follow the link you shared. So today devised strategy with client and convinced to follow this model. 

[Salvatore Cavallaro · Accepted solution]

convention commonly calculates that value using the formula:
WIP = number of team members + 1

[Nauman Sohail]

thanks @Salvatore Cavallaro  - this is concise help for me :) 

[Perisic Nikola]

Welcome to the community @Nauman Sohail !

There isn't really a best practice for how much of issues should be in the In Progress status, however for a sample project that you create using kanban - this is created by Atlassian, they have set this max number to be 5 issues.

You do this:

• Clicking on the three dots of your board and selecting Configure Board
• Select Columns 
• Within the Column Constraints and Set a constraint sub-section within a dropdown menu, select Issue count

Here, you can set both min and max number of issues.

Now for the second question, swimlanes would solve this issue, because this divides your board in separate sections. For the requirement, you need to use the JQL, that would look like this:

statusCategory is being used because there could be other statuses that are in the In Progress status category.

If you are only using In Progress status, you can use status instead of statusCategory.

[Nicola May]

From a traditional Kanban method perspective it should be minimal as the point is to ensure flow of work and 1 person can't effectively work on 20 things at the same time so a max of 5 is probably ideal.