Extending a Basic Kanban Board on Jira

If you’ve ever started using Kanban and thought, “this is great, but I wish it fit how I actually work better,” you’re not alone. Fortunately, platforms like Jira and Asana make it easy to experiment with customizations, they’ve built in a wide range of tools that let you adapt the system and see what works for you.

Of course their size and priorities bring drawbacks for individuals. Both are built for large teams working on software development/maintenance, and to accommodate a wide variety of project management approaches, including traditional waterfall, Kanban, and Scrum.

In this post, I’ll share how I’ve customized Jira’s Kanban board to fit my personal projects — what’s worked well, what hasn’t, and how you might adapt similar ideas for your own workflow.

Jira’s Setup

When you’re starting a new project on Jira, you’re given a number of “Space” templates to choose from. Spaces are their term for a project and everything related to it; and they’re broken out by the corporate department that would typically be working on the project. So you might have a Procurement process if you’re in Operations, or a Performance Review project for HR, with the core being the same across the templates just with different fields, view settings, etc.

As an individual any of these could work depending on your project, but for my case I use “Software Development” and the “Kanban” template as a starting point.

My Setup and Customizations

One of the first things I did was add a “Backlog” column to the right of the “To Do” column. This is where all my raw ideas go, giving me time and space to refine and elaborate on them until they are ready to be worked on.

I took it a step further and made it so that the Backlog is the only place where I can create new tasks. This makes sure I stick with the approach of giving things space to develop.

As I was working, I noticed that I had a couple of tasks that were ready in theory, but which really needed some additional research or thought before they could be done. To hold these, without getting in the way of the normal flow, I added another column called “Holding”. With that I can still see these blocked items and can come back to them later without cluttering my active work.

Another thing to consider is adding columns for each main step in a multi-part process. Like if you’re writing articles, you might brainstorm ideas, then write a draft, proofread it, have it edited, incorporate the edits, do a final review and then publish. Depending on how you approach things each of those could be columns, which would give a clearer insight if there is a step that consistently slows things down.

I also used the Scrum concept of an Epic. An Epic could be described as a large over-arching goal that you have, which you break down into smaller steps. In my case I’m using Epics to categorize tasks into larger topics, which lets me see at a glance where most of my work lies, and comes with a small report on the project overview.

The last vital tweak was adding a Work In Progress limit, so that I don’t spread myself too thin and stop making progress. When using the Kanban template, each column can have a limit by clicking the “…” on the header. I have a couple of different goals to work on, so I have been using a limit of 3 which I think is a good starting point overall.

Like most platforms each task has space for a description, and comments. I find it helpful to cover the task itself in as much detail as possible in the description area, and to track my decisions and thoughts in the comments. That way I have a record of my chain of thought and how I ended up at the current state.

Finally, I recently added an optional field for time estimates per task. I haven’t had a lot of time using this but it should help in prioritizing tasks and judging what I can feasibly do at the same time.

How has it Worked?

Overall Jira has been a solid platform for experimenting with Kanban ideas, and is flexible enough to try new structures, though it’s not always ideal for individual workflows.

I feel that adding an extra column to track ideas before they’re fully realized was very helpful, it got things out of my head so they didn’t distract me and gave me time to come back and create more comprehensive solutions to the issue. Likewise, adding the Holding column has let me set some things aside without loosing track of them.

Some things I haven’t found very useful include the built in priority field - for an individual user it seems easier to use the order to indicate priority.

Overall I think the biggest issue isn’t related this project, but in trying to handle several personal projects at the same time using separate boards. There are limited options to manage multiple boards which adds some cognitive load.

Also, Jira managing process flow through a push-oriented approach makes things a bit clunky with Kanban. For instance, if it could automatically pull either the top task from the To Do column or the highest priority one (using the Priority field) over to the Doing column, that would be extremely helpful.

Takeaways

Start out simple and only add complexity when you need to - every layer of complexity adds cognitive load.

Stay true what works for you. Don’t copy someone else’s process and expect perfect results.

Every Kanban board is also a learning opportunity: observe, reflect, and adjust until it fits how you actually work.

Next Time

These last two posts on Kanban got me thinking — what would a tool designed specifically for individuals with multiple goals look like? Could it give better visibility across all active work, while helping maintain focus and balance instead of just chasing velocity?

I’d love to hear your thoughts: what features would you want in a personal Kanban app?

Photo credit: Photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash