Kanban style boards are popular, but many boards don’t really implement anything more than the visual aspect of being able to drag a card from status to status. That’s not what Kanban is about though, and to really make a pull process like Kanban work within your team you need:
a way to set the number of cards that can be in a specific state, so WIP can be limited (by person, by team etc).
visual indicator of the WIP limit
a way to have “explicit agreements” being clear, about what must happen to a card to move it from state x to state y. That is, a definition of “done” for each Kanban state. It could be literal fields that must be completed in the card, or, a kind of text legend, say at the top of the board “lane” or, visible when clicking an icon…
an indicator of some kind, if you violate the “explicit agreements”.
@rickcogley All your ideas are good and considered for Kanban app. We are not focusing on it till public release though. Still this is on our radar for sure.
Thanks @mdubakov. Our primary need for Fibery is to be able to improve our work management overall, in a real way, by really considering “lean” principles and the core concepts of kanban. One of the problems we have is people focusing on too many tasks and trying to multitask, which is for most people super inefficient. If we can control the WIP even in a soft way, it acts as an everpresent reminder to focus, and to not multitask. We have a formal way of capturing support request tickets, but, there are actually a bunch of other tasks that also need to be managed of course.
Another problem is “what’s the definition of done” for some support request, and, I think there are several ways to skin the cat so to speak:
Make some states that act as a reminder to do the usual common things like “User Confirmation” (that it’s actually done), “Update Documentation” and so on, to kind of move the card through a series of steps before that card is really considered done. It might be a bit hacky at first, having a bunch of extra states to move the card through, but, it can be done by us. It would be best if there were ways to have “substates” on the board, so you don’t have to resort to weird naming.
Make some kind of way to make comments at the top of each column, related to the rules about moving cards out of the state. Indeed, this is also “soft” in that it’s up to the user to do it right, but, the reminder is there and if you expect users to be adults, then you can have a discussion if there is a quality problem. Maybe this is some icon that, when you hover over it, it shows the tips regarding moving out of that state.
Another thing came to mind that would work, I think: the “canvas” idea. If a Canvas could have a Kanban Board on it, and also text areas, the text areas could be used to cite the “explicit agreements” above the columns, somehow. A possibility?
I agree with these and glad to hear @mdubakov that this is in the works, I believe you’ve mentioned this in another context in fact.
I’d like to add that I’ve found very useful, and I think Targetprocess has this feature as well as tools like Leankit, to be able to have a “state above state” in Kanban, where you an break up columns. For example, the left-most column would be “unstarted,” with sub-columns of “parking lot” and “in planning” and “ready for development” for example. The Review column would have “ready for review” and then “in review” for example.
Very eager to see the improved Kanban stuff when you guys can get to it!
@mdubakov Great, thanks very much that type of stuff is just what I was hoping for. In no time it appears Fibery will have not just a view with cards, but a true full-featured capability for Agile Kanban, really looking forward to that as software development is my main focus for my team, although I am here because of all the other supporting capabilities of Fibery to let me run my entire team from one app!
I noticed Notion has now added a dedicated type of property of “status,” that’s pretty big as it really helps manage work in there.
And, maybe coincidentally, but obviously due to a need in the market, Confluence as also added this:
I got an email about that from Atlassian saying it was their biggest release yet (!?).
At any rate, I would still love to see Fibery have more here in the “state” capabilities. This was originally an extension, and the origins of Fibery back to TargetProcess and great boards there indicate the team is aware of the need, as you can see in @mdubakov 's post above. In particular, I think Notion at least has handled this need already:
We would love to have the ability to have multiple backlog and “in progress” states that could be seen on Fibery’s great boards. So I hope this request doesn’t get relegated to the deep, deep backlog, as we see a need for it every day!
I didn’t know about Notion’s categories. That is a really neat option to group status to convey a simple overall condition but also capture nuance (when something is in progress in can mean a bunch of different things).
I think there had been previous discussion on this and and the predefined categories (as Notion seems to have opted for) was seen as unworkable for fibery’s diverse uses. However, I think the categories option can still be useful.
This is a minor UI issue, but I gave up using status extensions (replaced them with single select fields) because I couldn’t get past the fact that the autogenerated progress circle didn’t reflect the actual progress. For example, if you had “Intake” as initial/zero state, “On Hold” would show some marginal progress. Also there was no way to distinguish between “Cancelled” and “Completed” if both had a “final” state.
I think a lot of the flexibility that has been discussed in the thread you mentioned and elsewhere, and the resistance to get too rigid with workflows, could be handled by simply adding some more flexibility into how the workflow extension (or “feature,” as it doesn’t seem to be technically an extension any more), could be set up. With Notion, they simply created 2 levels with this property, but the user can manipulate within that, so there is flexibility built-in.
I think your point here is particularly relevant:
because it actually highlights an element of the workflow extension that is imposed on users and is not that flexible. So my hope is that if the Fibery team has already gone so far as to add this extra feature, which I think is actually OK and find useful - but it could use some ability to be customized, which might solve your problem - then they might add in a few more elements to the workflow extension that would give it even more usefulness, especially for those using Fibery for software development or other processes like that tools like Pipefy and process.st handle. I feel like there are quite a few members here in the community asking for expanded workflow capabilities in the various threads, so I hope this gets addressed at some point in the none-too-distant future, especially now that both Confluence and Notion have picked up on this need.