Build and organise a Kanban board
Nick Peers reveals how to implement Kanban boards to help speed up project management, either for personal or work purposes.
Project management is a tricky skill. What can start out as a relatively simple task can spiral out of hand when you get underway and discover new angles, fresh requirements and who knows what else. It’s hard enough managing a project on your own, but what if your project involves other people, too?
It doesn’t matter whether you have a project for personal or work purposes, these days the recommend approach to project management is an Agile one. Agile allows for frequent changes to the spec – both minor and major – and aims to prioritise delivery of the project in manageable chunks.
There are various forms of Agile project management available, and we’re focusing on Kanban in this tutorial – see the box for a detailed description. The logic behind a Kanban board is that it provides an overview of both the project process and its progress, encouraging you to pull tasks from the board when you’re in a position to allocate time to them rather than the other way round.
Standalone boards
All Kanban tools work on the principle of being accessed through your web browser, which usually involves installing a server component, configuring it for local or remote access and then going on from there. If you’re planning a larger project involving more than one person, then skip to the section on Wekan.
If you’re looking for a simple, fuss-free option for your sole use, then My Personal Kanban meets your needs. It’s basically a one-page Html/javascript application that runs through your web browser from inside a single folder – note, everything is kept offline, so you don’t even need an internet connection to use it.
Head over to https://greggigon.github.io/ my-personal-kanban and click Download .zip. Once done, extract the my-personal-kanban folder somewhere suitable – your Home folder for example – and then double-click the index.html file inside to open it in your web browser.
Start by clicking the Kanban drop-down menu in the right-hand corner and choose New. Give your board a name, choose how many lists you want (anything from two to nine is supported) and click Create new.
Your lists will be created as blank columns. Click the spanner icon to the left of one to rename it, select a colour and set a limit for how many cards the list can
hold at any one time (or leave it blank, which means unlimited). You can also create new lists to the left or right of this column or delete it from here too. Click Update when done.
Adding cards
Click + next to a list name to create a card in that column. If you’re starting out on a project, you’ll want to place everything in the first column, whether it’s the to-do column or (if you’re using sprints) backlog. Cards consist of a title, optional description and card colour. Click Add when done.
Once created, only the card’s title is displayed to save space – double-click it to view the description or make changes. Once your project is in progress, you can easily click and drag cards between columns as they move through the process or drag them up and down to rearrange their order within the current column.
Once an item reaches the final column, you’ll see a folder button appear inside it – click this to archive the item and hide it from view. To view these items, select Kanban>archives where you can unarchive or delete them as required.
You can create multiple Kanban boards using My Personal Kanban – once you’ve set up one, you’ll be able to use it as a template for future boards. You can then switch between boards using the Switch to dropdown menu.
More power!
My Personal Kanban is fine for small-scale, personal projects, but if you want to expand your scope (and include other people) you need Wekan (https://wekan. github.io), which is an open-source server. Its home page is a little impenetrable if we’re honest – there are a bewildering array of options for installing the server, for starters.
Ultimately, though, it boils down to running it in a docker container or as a 64-bit Snap, with builds available for both arm64 (RPI 3 or later, RPI 4 with 4GB RAM recommended) and x64 machines. For the purposes of this tutorial, we installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 19.10 server and discovered Wekan was one of the Snap packages available for install during the setup process.
Otherwise, Wekan supports most 64-bit distros (but not currently Centos 7) with the latest version of Debian, Ubuntu or Mint recommended. First install snap if necessary ( sudo apt install snapd ) and then install Wekan:
$ sudo snap install wekan
Wekan is now technically up and running, but unable to contact the outside world. If you’re only going to use it inside your local network then you need only to issue a single command:
$ sudo snap set wekan root-url=’http://192.168.x.y’ port=80
Substitute 192.168.x.y with your server’s IP address. You should now be able to access Wekan on another networked device simply by typing your server’s IP address into your web browser. If you want to make
Wekan available outside of your network, check out the step-by-step guide to find out what you need to provide a secure remote connection. Once that’s in place, type the following command: $ sudo snap set wekan root-url=’https://yourdomain. com’ port=3001
You’ll now be able to access your Wekan server from any internet connection by simply typing https:// yourdomain.com into your browser.
We’re almost done setting things up, but not quite – the first command enables Wekan to update itself overnight, while the final commands ensure that you can get started with setting up your first user and logging in:
$ snap set core refresh.schedule=02:00-04:00
$ sudo snap set wekan mail-url=’smtps://user:pass@ mailserver.example.com:453’
$ sudo snap set wekan mail-from=’wekan Boards support@example.com’
Leave the dummy information intact for now – you’ll be able to change this information after setting up your account by clicking your username in the top right-hand corner and choosing Admin Panel>email. Do this before anyone registers so they receive the email required to verify their account.
Now Wekan is up and running, we can focus on getting started with using it. When you type the URL into your web browser, you’ll be whisked to the Wekan login screen. Because you’re the first user, click Register to set up your account. Supply a username, email and password, then click Register.
The first user created is automatically assigned an administrator role, giving you full access to Wekan’s features. Let’s start by adding our first board – click Add Board to create it. Give your board a title, ignore the other options for now and click Create.
Your next job is to populate this board with lists – like My Personal Kanban, these are displayed as columns, but are more flexible. Take the time to click the list’s burger icon to reveal options for colouring it, setting a WIP (work-in-progress) limit on the number of cards you can to it to prevent overloading a specific part of your project, plus a ‘watch’ option that will email you every time changes are made to the selected list (you can also watch entire boards – click the Muted button next to your board’s name to enable this).
Setting cards
When it comes to populating these lists with cards, you’ll find Wekan offers far more scope than My Personal Kanban. Click Add Card and you can quickly add cards simply by typing their titles and hitting Enter to move on to the next. Click a card title to add more information – from here not only can you add a simple description as with My Personal Kanban, but you can add checklists and sub-tasks, assign dates and even allocate the task to specific users to complete. Each card has even more customisable options hidden behind its own hamburger menu – again, you’ll find options to colour and watch cards, and the ability to create custom fields if the options offered don’t meet your needs.
Wekan offers three types of view to help with managing larger projects. The default is the familiar column-based List view, but choose Swimlanes and you add an extra layer of segmentation in the form of horizontal bands. These lanes enable you to further divide up cards within each list – for example, you can use them as the basis for sprints, or simply to provide a visual glance at which people are responsible for which tasks. Cards can easily be dragged and dropped between lists and Swimlanes as required.
The final option is Calendar view, which does what it says on the tin. This view works best for those cards with dates and times assigned to them – a handy overview of what tasks are about to become due. Switch to this view and you get the current day’s view displaying those cards with due dates on that day, plus options to navigate to different dates.
Get collaborating
As we’ve seen, one of Wekan’s strengths is that it makes it easy for you to manage multi-person projects. Click the burger icon underneath your username in the top right-hand corner of the Wekan window to open the board settings window. You’ll see a Members list at the top – click + and either start typing a person’s name, clicking their name when they pop up in the list, or click ‘Invite via email’ to get people to sign up for their Wekan account and then join the board.
Once a person has joined, click their name to change their access level (users are granted ‘normal’ status by default for viewing and editing existing cards), filter their view of cards or lists, title, label, or revoke their access.
Beneath the list of users, you’ll options for editing and adding new labels – click a label to give it a name for identification purposes, change its colour or remove it completely. Beneath this is a list of activities, basically a scrolling history of changes to the board.
You’ll also notice a settings cog in the slide-out panel’s top-right corner: click this to access the board’s settings – its main use is for customising your cards by removing unused fields like dates and adding your own custom ones that apply to all cards across the board.
Wekan is like an onion – keep peeling and you’ll find additional layers of functionality. The box (left) reveals how to use Wekan’s rules system to create basic automation and you dig deeper into the program’s capabilities by visiting its online wiki (www.github.com/ wekan/wekan/wiki). Your next project – however small or large – just got a lot easier to manage…