With the December update, we have made a huge breakthrough in 2 major areas which have been in our backlog for a long time and have been repeatedly requested by customers across the globe.
Card Color by Different Card Attributes
“Visualization” is the primary goal of Kanban and the Kanban board is the heart of any Kanban system. Any team working with Kanban follows one key principle – to have all the work items visualized on the board. But over a period of time, as more and more item-types get added, it can become difficult for team members to keep track of important work items and their status as they are spread across the board. In large team Kanban systems, this can be a significant issue.
SwiftKanban has a feature on the board called “Legend” to support this issue. Clicking on the Legend highlights the selected group of cards on the board. Until the December update, it worked only for the “card type“ attribute. Over time, many of our users have requested that we provide the option to highlight cards using other card attributes as well.
A common scenario where this is important is when multiple teams share a Kanban board. Each of them might have their own work item type, and often a specific set of card attributes, including tags, important to them. They wanted to be able to highlight the exact set of cards that they were working on based on such attributes.
In this update, we are pleased to launch an enhancement to the Legend function, so now you can select any of the important attributes of the card and use the Legend based on it. All you need to do is click on the Legend option (as shown below), select a specific attribute and click apply. For ease of use, we provide unique color options against each value.
Here is how the new board Legend looks!
If you have multi-team boards, or you were looking to highlight cards on the board based on different criteria, you will now find it a breeze. Give a whirl and let us know how you like it!
Org-Level Card Data Analyser
As Kanban makes inroads in an organization and adoption grows across various teams and departments, the need for organization-level reporting becomes important. At the Org level, SwiftKanban provides several Dashboard components which collate information from multiple boards at the account level and provide graphical representation of the data.
Considering the great response we received for our Card Data Analyser at the board level, we are introducing a Beta version at the Org (account) level under Dashboard. With the new Card Data Analyser, the capability to slice and dice different aspects of your Kanban board data and use pivot table gets a huge boost!
Most business users are very familiar with MS Excel where, using the Pivot Table option, users build ad hoc reports from time to time. All card attributes will be available for the users to filter the data similar to the component at the board level. Additionally, we have provided the attribute “Board”, so all your data is tabulated in terms of rows and columns for any board. Getting all the card data with respect to any attribute is now just a matter of seconds.
Here is a sample screenshot of the Org-level Card Data Analyzer.
Just in case you missed it, there are several built-in charts available in the Analyser component which provide a powerful representation of the card data. Here is a screenshot of the chart options available in the component, along with a sample chart.
Going one step further, we have also added a Drill-down option! By clicking on any number on the table, you will see the list of cards contribute to that number. To view a specific card, just click on the Card Id or Title and you will be able to see all the card details.
If you want to use certain filters on a routine basis, we have provided a “Save Filter” option, so that reports can be generated easily and quickly.
We hope you will love these two new features – do let us know. If you feel strongly about any improvements needed, let us know about those as well!
Priyank Parekh
Product Manager, SwiftKanban