What are the Key Features and Benefits of using a Kanban Board in Jira?

With the increasing complexity of the projects, managing the project becomes challenging. However, Agile Methodologies provide various frameworks to efficiently manage our projects. Among these, Kanban Boards are known for their flexibility and easy integration with the project workflow. In this article, we will gain all the insights of key features and benefits of using Kanban Board in JIRA, so that we can easily identify the use cases to choose Kanban Board for our project.

What is the Kanban Board?

Kanban Board is a visual tool that helps agile teams manage the project workflow by visualizing the various tasks, issues, bugs, or activities. With Kanban Board, they can easily create the issues or tasks for the project and order them according to their priority using the drag-and-drop interface. However, it is not limited to these features. It has various features, each covering the core agile principles.

Features of Kanban Board

1. Pull-System Approach

They provide a Pull-System based management which means that we have to resolve the various issues and risks as they occur in the system. This prevents us from the unnecessary activities without any requirement.

2. Supports the backlog for issues

Backlog is the visual workflow where the Agile teams can create the tasks or issues before they are pulled into the Kanban Board. This feature of JIRA Kanban boards helps us to create and prioritize issues. Also, we can move our issues between Backlog and Board to prioritize the tasks.

3. Swimlanes for categorizing the issues

Using the Kanban Board in JIRA, we can easily bifurcate the tasks, issues or bugs according to the assignees, priority, or issue types. Thus, users can easily visualize the issues in the Project workflows in a categorical manner.

4. Grouping and Filtering

If you want the Kanban Board to highlight only the right things to your team, you can use the grouping and filtering feature in the Kanban Board. It has an assignee filter using which the issues containing a search term are visible to particular members. Additionally, it has the Group By filter using which we can list the issues according to the categories.

5. Can be used for Team as well as Company Managed Projects

JIRA allows us to create the Kanban Board for both the team as well company-managed projects. The Team-managed projects can be managed by anyone on the team. Thus, it is suitable for autonomous teams. On the other hand, Company-managed Projects are managed by the JIRA admins to enable the shared workflow across multiple projects.

6. Supports WIP

The Work-In-Progress limits (WIP) help us to prevent work overload. It keeps the limit on the number of tasks for each column so that a particular workflow does not have too much pressure in terms of project tasks.

7. Creating Reports

Agile teams can create reports in the Kanban Board to track the Cycle Time of the Project Workflow. Also, it provides various charts such as Cumulative Flow Diagram and Control Chart to analyze the performance of the project workflow.

8. Automating the Workflow

The Kanban Boards in JIRA have a feature of Automation using which we can make our workflow as a set of automatically executed tasks. The Automation feature helps in creating rule-based automation, triggers or action events for the state transition.

Benefits of Kanban Board

1. Continuous Delivery

The changes or updates are continuously reflected in the Kanban Boards throughout the lifecycle. Hence, it supports continuous workflow management, which helps us to maintain a consistent pace during the project initiation and execution phases.

2. Re-use Workflow

You do not need to modify the existing setup to implement the Kanban Boards. You can easily maintain the existing roles and assign them the tasks highlighted in the Kanban Cards.

3. Faster Workflow

The visual approach of the Kanban Board helps in faster updates about the project’s progress. Also, the continuous improvement and integration feature helps us to achieve early delivery of the project.

4. Time-Saving

The stand-up meetings and sessions are optional in Kanban so that we can use that time in managing some other tasks in the workflow. Along with this, we can also integrate other development tools with the Kanban Board, without managing the separate task log for other tasks.

5. Reduces the Pressure of Timeline

It has a flexible timeline as it does not focus on strict timelines or constraints for execution activities. In addition to this, the standup meetings or sessions are optional in Kanban which makes the execution faster.

6. Availability of Current Status of Issues

Kanban Board in JIRA provides the ‘insights’ feature which tells us the status and priority of the current issues. In this way, various Agile Principles for managing the project are covered in it.

7. Interactive Timelines

In JIRA Kanban Board, the timelines can be managed by creating the epics which are large tasks to be broken down into smaller tasks. These epics can be mapped with the work items, dependencies and releases. Thus, timeline management is user-friendly.

8. Built-in Template

We do not need to create the Kanban Board from scratch. JIRA provides various templates for creating the Kanban Board that can be customized as per our Agile requirements.

Conclusion

Using the Kanban Board in JIRA for Project Management is simple and easy for initiating the project. It provides various features that support the agile principles for managing the project. The features of Swimlanes, columns, Work-In-Progress Limits, the backlog of Issues, advanced search filters and a flexible timeline collectively provide a very adaptive workflow for our Project. Along with this, it also has the ‘insights’ feature which tells us the status and priority of the current issues.