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

- Record Filter

- 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.

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.