Creating Kanban Board in Tableau

Kan(view)ban(board) has been used as a visual process management tool by Toyota since 1940s. Nowadays, it is widely adopted beyond manufacturing industry, especially in agile software development.

I first used Kanban board on Jira platform from Atlassian. I never thought I would need to design it in Tableau because it doesn't have many visual elements. However, I have been part of a few dashboard designs for project management. We can add visual elements using Tableau to make Kanban look better.

Recently someone came up to me asking how to design a Kanban board in Tableau. Here is my answer to it. Hope it's helpful.

Data Model

The key to Kanban data model is a history of task status changes. Each record in the history must include: Task, Status, UpdateTime, TaskID and maybe other attributes.

This data model will also help analyze details like time spent per task, # of tasks completed per week etc, to gain more insights into the workflow, if we wish.

Board Design

- Index() on Rows

The key in designing the Kanban board, is placing the discrete Index() on Rows, computing along TaskID which is in Details. This way, all the task tiles will be stacked up tightly. Then uncheck "Show Header".

- Record Filter

This filter is designed to keep only tasks of the latest status.

- Show Empty Columns

Assuming that we have a history of data where each status appeared at lease once, we can use this technique. This will give us a fixed grid even when no task is in a status. Otherwise a status column may be missing when no task is in that status, and the grid is varying.

We can design Kanban board of various styles. Below are a few simple examples which can be downloaded here. Based on these, you can build more sophisticated Kanban if you wish. But, it might defeat the purpose of Kanban.

Caveats

- Remove Done tasks

Done tasks should not stay on the board forever. There needs a condition by which the tasks be taken off the board. For example we can design a filter that keeps the Done tasks of the latest 3 days.

- ColumnWise Design for a Fixed Grid

If we only use a snapshot of the historical data, where some statuses may be missing from time to time. for example, if there is no blocked task, the Blocked column will not show. The board grid will be changed. The column wise design will fix this problem by keeping a stable grid, no matter whether tasks of some statuses are available or not. Basically, it means one status column per sheet. We need 5 sheets for this Kanban.

(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button.

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

Go to the target dashboard
Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager
Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest.
Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.
The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help.