Kanban board online: set up one your team will actually use

What is a kanban board online?

A kanban board online is the whiteboard with sticky notes, moved into your browser. You get lists (columns) for the stages your work goes through and cards for the pieces of work. A card moves from left to right as it gets done. That's the whole idea. It's also why kanban has outlived every methodology trend I've watched come and go: anyone gets it in thirty seconds.

The online part matters more than it sounds. A wall board works while everybody sits in the same room. Once one person works from home, or the team spreads across time zones, the wall goes stale by Tuesday and the sticky notes start curling at the corners. An online kanban board is the one place everyone can see from a laptop or a phone, and it remembers what moved and when.

Here are the words I use for the rest of this page, so we mean the same thing:

Online kanban board vs a whiteboard vs a to-do list

People usually compare an online board with one of two things they already use. Here's how the three stack up for a team:

The to-do list is the one people underestimate. A list tells you what's left. A board tells you where things are stuck, and for a project manager that's the more useful question. If half your list says "in progress," you don't have a plan, you have a pile.

This is what a plain three-list board looks like in Kanbanchi. Color labels show the type of work, dates sit at the bottom of each card, and the avatars tell you who owns what.

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How to set up an online kanban board for your team

This is the order I follow every time a team asks me for a board. It takes about twenty minutes. Most of that goes on the conversation in step 1. The clicking is the quick part.

1. 1

   Map the stages your work really goes through

   Ask the team what happens to a request from the moment it arrives until it's finished. Write the stages down in their words, not in textbook words. If people say "waiting for legal," that's a list. Start with four to six lists. If you end up with ten, some of them are probably statuses that belong on the card as a label rather than as a list.

2. 2

   Decide what one card means

   One card is one piece of work that one person can finish in a few days. "Website" is not a card. "Write the pricing FAQ" is. Bigger things become a card with a checklist inside it, or, on Kanbanchi Premium and above, a card with subcards.

3. 3

   Set WIP limits on Doing and Review

   Start low. My rule of thumb is the number of people who work on that stage, plus one. If the limit hurts in the first week, good. It's showing you exactly where work piles up. In Kanbanchi you set it per list in List Details with Limit card number, and the counter turns red when a list goes over, so it nudges people rather than blocking them.

4. 4

   Add owners, dates and the actual files

   Every card in Doing needs one owner. Dates are optional in To do but useful once work starts. What saves me the most time is attaching the real thing, the Doc, the Sheet or the email, so nobody asks "where's the latest version?" again. On every Kanbanchi plan you can attach files from My Drive and Shared Drives, turn emails into cards and see due dates in Google Calendar.

5. 5

   Invite the team and agree on three rules

   Mine are short. Pull, don't push (you take the next card when you have room); if it isn't on the board, it isn't happening; and Done means done, not "done apart from the review." I write the rules on a card at the top of the first list, so new people see them on day one.

6. 6

   Walk the board together, right to left

   Ten minutes a day, standing up or on a call, ideally before anyone opens their inbox. Start with the cards closest to Done and work back to the left, because finishing beats starting. Ask about the card that hasn't moved, not about the person. After a few weeks, look at how long cards take from start to finish; the Kanbanchi guide to cycle time vs lead time shows how to read those numbers.

When a board gets busy, I group it instead of making it longer. In Kanbanchi you can group cards by person, color label, tag, priority or card color, and split the board into swimlanes by color labels or tags. That's how one board can serve a whole team without turning into a wall of cards.

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Moving over from another tool? You don't have to retype anything: Kanbanchi imports boards from Trello and from CSV files.

Where Kanbanchi fits, and where it doesn't

Short version: if your team already works in Google Workspace, Kanbanchi is hard to beat. Here is why, plus the few things worth knowing first. It comes from what project managers write in reviews and what I run into myself.

• 4.7on G2
• 4.6on Google Workspace Marketplace
• 4.7customer service on Capterra

Where it's strong

1. It lives inside Google Workspace

   You sign in with Google, and every board is stored as a Drive file.

   Good fit if your team already lives in Gmail and Drive.

2. Google tools on every plan

   Drive attachments, cards from email, the Gmail add-on and Google Calendar dates. No upsell.

   Good fit if most of your work arrives by email.

3. Teams get going fast

   Reviewers like the real-time view of who's doing what. Support gets a lot of thank-yous for answering quickly.

   Good fit if you need the board running this week.

4. Reports are built in

   Open a board's Reports for a team performance chart, a burndown chart or a cumulative flow diagram.

   Good fit if someone asks you for progress every Friday.

5. It grows with you

   Gantt chart, task dependencies, time tracking and Team Workload come with Professional.

   Good fit if your board is turning into a project plan.

My take: for a Google Workspace team, it's the board people will actually open. Still unsure? The decision guide settles it in a few clicks.

Where Kanbanchi doesn't do this

If your team doesn't sign in with Google Workspace or Microsoft accounts, most of Kanbanchi's advantages disappear, and a general board app will feel simpler. If you need some cards hidden from some people, for example HR work and everyone else's on one board, you'll need separate boards. And if you want a board without creating any account at all, Kanbanchi isn't it: it's built for teams who sign in.

For everyone else, the deciding factor is usually how much more than a board you need. That's what the guide below sorts out.

Four online kanban board examples worth copying

Kanban isn't only for software teams. These are the four boards I end up building most often, with the lists I'd start from. Copy them, then rename anything that doesn't sound like your team.

The sales board is the one I like showing sceptics, because it proves kanban isn't just a developer thing. Each client is a card, the lists are the stages of the deal, and the checklist inside the card is your sales process. You can see at a glance which client has been sitting in Trial for too long.

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If you'd rather not start from a blank board, templates come with every Kanbanchi plan, and the guide to kanban board templates has more layouts to borrow. If you're still unsure what a board should look like for your kind of work, what is a kanban board covers the basics.

Kanban board online: FAQ