When we designed Kanban Zone, our goal was to provide a solution for visualizing process flows using online Kanban boards. What was critical to solving was not only flowing cards on a single Kanban board but making sure that these boards could flow work to each other. Ultimately Kanban Zone is designed to connect all the processes or teams working within an organization so that the ideal flow of work across the organization can be achieved.
To explain connected boards, we will use 3 boards:
- Product flows feature cards for the overall product
- Team-1 flows story cards assigned to Team 1
- Team-2 flows story cards assigned to Team 2
Connecting boards through cards
To create a connection between boards, you simply need to link cards that exist on two or more different boards. In this case, the Product board has three feature cards that are linked to their respective children’s cards on other boards for teams to deliver these cards. For purposes of illustration, we color-coded each parent feature card to match the color of each child’s story card.
- Feature-1 (green cards) has 3 children story cards assigned to Team 1
- Feature-2 (red cards) has 2 children story cards assigned to Team 2
- Feature-3 (purple cards) has 5 children story cards assigned to both Team 1 and Team 2.
The 3 boards are connected through the links between the cards.
- The Product board is connected to both Team-1 and Team-2 boards because Feature-1 has children cards on Team-1, Feature-2 has children cards on Team-2 and Feature-3 has children cards on both Team-1 and Team-2.
- The Team-1 and Team-2 boards are connected because Story C from Team-1 is linked to Story D from Team-2 as successor/predecessor link and Story D from Team-2 is linked to Story E from Team-1 as successor/predecessor link.