We skipped December’s release notes, but we are back with our monthly release notes for January 2021. We are starting the new year with features to improve your flow around blocked cards and card metrics, as well as performance and usability when searching.
Here are a few upcoming highlights for 2021: viewing boards as a list with the ability to perform bulk actions, a fresh look and feel to navigate Kanban Zone to access the new List view, and more detailed metrics to better identify bottlenecks. As always, we welcome feature requests, so let us know what else you would like to see in 2021…
Blocked Cards
When you block a card, the blocking reason now appears in full when viewing a blocked card on a board, and when looking at linked cards within a card. Instead of just seeing the blocked icon and having to open the card, now you can immediately know why a card is blocked and hopefully get it unblocked faster!
Card Metrics
We introduced a new tab on cards called Metrics. This is where you can track the entire lifecycle of a card in terms of the time a card spent in each column state of the board.
- Lead Time = the time a card stayed in a Backlog or Start column (not in WIP yet)
- Cycle Time = the time a card stayed in a Buffer or In Progress column (WIP)
- Total Time= the total time a card took to reach a Done column
We are continuing to add more detailed metrics in Kanban Zone, so stay tuned for even more metrics to help you measure your flow of work and identify bottlenecks.
You should also notice that the previous All tab has been renamed Recent and moved as the last tab on the right. It continues to show all the card interactions (comments, checklists, attachments, links) in chronological order, but also a full audit log to see every change related to a card.
Quick tip… Kanban Zone will remember the tab you last used, so the next time you open a card it will default to the that tab.
Faster Search
You should notice under the Search panel a new checkbox to include (or not) the archived cards. When excluding archived cards, you will experience faster search results. When including archived cards, the results will now show cards based on relevancy (active and archived), instead of showing all archived cards at the bottom of the search results.
As always, don’t hesitate to send us your feedback so that we can continue to improve Kanban Zone. You will never hurt our feelings if you find an issue or something that could be improved, so don’t be shy.
– The Kanban Zone Team
