Kanban board template

Kanban board template

I started working with a team that wants to use kanban to help organise and deliver their work. That got me thinking, and this template is the result. I’ve included a page with Setup instructions, and a list of all the formulae, all the shape IDs, and a bit about the logic behind the board. 

You have the ability to limit Work-In-Progress (WIP) for each column, and also to put a WIP limit on the number of cards each team member can work on. Anytime a WIP limit is broken the card background turns a lovely shade of red.

I have added 11 custom date fields to each Lucid Card - one field for each column of the kanban board. They are imaginatively named col1 - col11 because that’s quicker to type than ‘Development - Doing’ in a formula. The only overhead with the work is the team member has to enter the date into the appropriate date field each time the card moves columns. Lead Time is calculated as the net working days between col1 and col11 (Ready Queue and Done); Cycle Time is calculated as the net working days between col2 and col10 (Analysis - Doing and Deploy).

There are three dashboards available: the first uses the cards on the kanban board while the sprint / time period is in progress - all the metrics are for the inflight cards; the second is used at the end of the sprint / time period - simply drag and drop all the Done cards into the drop zone and the second dashboard comes alive; and the third is for long term annual stats - after you have the insights for the current sprint / time period, drag and drop the cards from the first drop zone into the larger annual drop zone and you will see the long term metrics.

I’ve set the kanban board up using a dynamic table and set the columns to ‘Tag’. The list of tags corresponds to the column names so if you want to change the names, edit the tag list. All the formulae are independent of column names so nothing will break when the names change. The only thing I haven’t done is to make the board and formulae independent of the number of columns - my head hurts just thinking about it. Please reach out if I’ve left in any unintended features - some people might call them bugs - and I’ll do my best to fix them.

And remember, go with the flow ...