Using

Using Kanban Toolkit

This page is the application from the outside — the workspace, a board, a card, an initiative, and the views that read the same work at another altitude. Installing it is the other half; nothing here needs a server.

The workspace

The Kanban Toolkit button at the top left returns to Boards: every board in the organisation, grouped by flight level (team, programme, portfolio), with a band filter and a search. New board makes one.

On a browser-only build the browser is the whole workspace — nothing is sent anywhere. On an instance the boards are shared, and signing in makes the account one of the workspace's people.

The command palette (Ctrl+K, or ⌘+K) reaches every board, card and view, and the verbs that make them. The search field beside it searches every board by title.

A board

Every board has four fixed stages: Backlog, Not Started, In Progress and Done. The stage belongs to the column, so a card's status is never a word somebody chose; the shape inside a stage is the team's. Edit board splits a column into cells, renames them, adds a lane, or removes one — a split cell is still in its stage, the work simply reads more precisely.

A team board carries two workflows. The cards workflow is the team's own flow; the initiatives workflow is where the same work is read as outcomes. A programme or portfolio board aggregates other boards and shows the wider view instead of a cards workflow of its own.

A card is made in a lane's footer (Add card to …) or from Card in the toolbar. Drag it to another cell to move it. A column can carry a WIP limit; Settings decides what a limit does — tint the column (visualize), hold the move until a reason is given (justify), or refuse it (block).

The keyboard is a full way in, not a fallback: focus a card and press Shift+F10 for its menu — Move to lane, Move earlier, Move later, Set parent… — and Enter to choose. Escape closes a panel and gives the focus back.

A card

Choose a card to open its panel. Overview holds the title, the description (Markdown), status, priority, type, people, tags and target dates; the creator is recorded and is not editable. Hierarchy shows the parent and the work below. Activity is the card's own history — every move, edit, note and dependency, with who and when.

The checklist holds the card's sub-tasks. A card can wait on another: the waiting state is read from the two ends, so it clears when the blocker reaches Done — there is nothing to update by hand. Mark blocked records a reason when the work is stopped for something that is not another card.

Initiatives

An initiative is the unit the wider organisation reads. It has no estimate and no status field: its status is the rollup of the cards below it, and its percentage is the share of those cards that are done. Add a card and the number moves, because the work moved.

Its section — Backlog, Not Started, In Progress, Done — is derived from that rollup; the cell inside the section is where a person arranged it. Dragging an initiative moves it within its section. Its parent is set from Change parent in the panel or Set parent… in the card menu, which is how a programme's outcome is decomposed into a team's initiative.

The views

• Dashboard — the board's initiatives at a glance.
• Timeline — the same initiatives over their target dates.
• Flow — lead time, cycle time and throughput for the board.
• Archive — work that is done and filed away.
• Objectives — objectives and key results, and the strategic initiatives that serve them.
• My work — everything assigned to you, across boards.

None of these is a second copy: they read the same items, placements and edges.

Keeping a copy

Boards → Export downloads the whole workspace as JSON; Import… replaces it with a file, after a confirmation. Export CSV on a board writes its cards as a table. On an instance the server holds the same workspace, and backup is the operator's copy of it.

Accounts, invitations and roles belong to the instance: they are managed on its Admin screen. Install and configure are how the application is run in the first place.