The Jira software tool by Atlassian provides various template-based features for getting started with Kanban without any delay. However, customizing the board as per the project requirements makes the actual difference in the quality of the project execution. There are various customizable options that you can use to configure your Kanban Board, such as modifying the core features and integrations with other tools.
Prerequisite: Create Kanban Board in Jira
Customizable Options for Kanban Board Configuration
1. Customize Timeline View of the Project
Kanban allows you to track and view the timeline of the project in different options. You can track the timeline by the current day, weeks, months, and quarters. This helps us easily visualize the deadlines of the various epics, tasks, subtasks, or issues. In addition to this, you can also enable Child-level issue scheduling in the timeline, so that you can also manage the timeline of subtasks (child tasks) hierarchically.
Interactive Project Timeline in the Jira Kanban Board
2. Configure Default Assignees of Tasks
Whenever you create an issue, it has to be assigned to a team member who is responsible for resolving it. If there is no assignee of the tasks, Kanban enables us to create a default assignee of the tasks, so that the tasks are automatically assigned as soon as they are created. Later on, the default assignee can delegate those tasks to team members. In this way, no tasks remain unclaimed in the workflow.
Assigning the tasks without task-owner to the default assignee
3. Customizing Roles for Project Access
In this option, you can perform various role-based customization in your Jira Kanban Board. You can change the project access to private, or limited for the public. You can add people to your team and assign them a pre-defined role. The various people in the team can be filtered and searched according to the roles assigned to them.
Managing who can access the project data in Kanban
Moreover, the Jira Kanban Board generally has three types of roles namely the Administrator, Member, and Viewer but you can also create your custom roles and configure their access to the project as per your preference. Thus, if the default roles do not fit in your project, you can create the custom roles and assign them to your project team members.
Creating a Custom Role in Jira Kanban Board to manage Project Access
4. Custom Notifications
Project experts always want their team to become aware at every point of the project milestones. Thus, you can also create custom notifications in the project, so that the team members are notified whenever any changes or updates take place in the project. Kanban Board in Jira has custom email notifications for different events such as creating issues, completion of the epic or deadline alerts.
Managing the notifications about the Project activities and events in Kanban
5. Custom Issue Type in Kanban
Kanban board allows you to create the Issue, Bug, Tasks, or subtasks in your Project workflow. If any of these does not suit your project, a custom issue type is available in the board. You can define it as per the preference and then, various tasks can be assigned to this custom issue type in your project. For example, you can create an incident, new feature or support as a custom issue type.
Kanban helps us to create project-specific Issue Types
6. Selecting the Features in Kanban Board
Kanban Board in Jira has some features enabled by default. However, some features have to be manually activated. The application of these features varies from project to project. Some features like board and timeline are enabled by default, while some features like Reports, Sprints, Project Pages, Backlog, Deployment, Releases and many more can be turned on as and when required in the Project.
Activating special features in Jira Kanban Board
7. Custom Filter in Project
As the project becomes large and the number of tasks or issues increases, you may find it difficult to search for a particular issue to update it or mark it as done. Thus, you can create a custom reusable filter that can be applied anytime when you want to sort or view issues, tasks and bugs in a particular order. Hence, you can easily customize the kanban board for searching the issues or bugs.
Kanban Board in Jira provides custom filters for advanced search
8. Add Cover Image for Card
When this feature is enabled in your kanban board, the first attached image on the kanban card becomes a cover image for the card. This enhances the visual representation of the kanban board, so that the team members can quickly identify the nature of the tasks or issues in the project workflow. For example, you can attach an image highlighting the errors, so that the team can quickly notice the task and take the necessary actions.
Project issues in Kanban swimlanes are user-interactive
9. Create a Toolchain for Project Phases
Across the various phases of your project, you may require multiple tools to manage and execute the project tasks. Using the Kanban board in Jira, you can create a toolchain in which multiple tools can be integrated for planning, deployment, development, testing, etc. Hence, Kanban board customization options allow the users to manage the entire development lifecycle.
Configuring Custom Tools for advanced project management in Kanban
10. Project Page for Maintaining the Project’s Info
The customization option in the Jira Kanban board helps us to document, what we executed under the project plans. Be it meeting notes or requirement notifications, you can create and manage all the documents in one place so that all the team members can access them to update or get follow-ups on the project’s progress.
You can make the Project’s data centralized using Kanban Board in Jira
Conclusion
Kanban Board in Jira has multiple customizable options, so that it becomes aligned with our requirements. Along with the core features such as WIP Limits, continuous delivery, backlog management and pull system approach and timeline management, Kanban has multiple configuration options that are flexible and customizable for our project. After gaining sufficient information about the customizable options in Kanban board, you can easily plan and configure it in Jira for your project.