Your Kanban board helps you to visualize what’s important, understand priorities and keep everyone on the same page.
We see Karbon customers sort their Kanban columns and apply filters in lots of interesting ways, to create a dashboard that gives them exactly what they need.
Here are the 5 of the most common Kanban Board dashboards that we see, with the steps to replicate it in Karbon for yourself. If you recreate any of these, don’t forget to save it to come back to again later!
What other dashboards have we missed? We’d love to hear what your go-to custom Kanban dashboards are in the comments.
#1. To stay across the progress of your own team
Dashboard name: <Team Name> Team’s Work
Filters: Assignee = <Team Name> (e.g. “Bookkeeping”)
Columns sorted by: Due Date / Start Date
Want a quick bird’s eye view of everything the Bookkeeping Team is working on? How many clients the Implementation Team is onboarding? Or a visual of the Accounting Team's pipeline?
Create this dashboard for each team that you need to be across.
#2. To identify bottlenecks amongst similar jobs
Dashboard name: <Work Type> Work
Filters: Work Type = <Work Type>
Columns sorted by: Status
Applying a filter by Work Type will show all work items of the same kind. If you want to view more than one Work Type together, you can select as many as you want. For example, every Work Type relating to tax processes.
Sorting your columns by Status will help you identify where all the jobs stand amongst your overall workflow. You can quickly notice bottlenecks, and predict where bottlenecks are about to occur.
For example, if you have many Month-End work items in the “Prep” stage, you will know that they are about to progress to “Review”, and your Controller or Partner may soon be overwhelmed.
Checking this dashboard will help you predict and prepare for this type of scenario.
#3. To manage team capacity
Dashboard name: Capacity Weekly
Filters: Due date = This week; Overdue
Columns sorted by: Assignee
View the work items assigned to each team member over a period of time, monitor workload and capacity, and redistribute work as needed.
You might find it useful to add a due date filter, and only show work items that are due this week or overdue. This allows you to see a digestible amount and highlights the highest priorities.
Look at the estimated time totals for every team member to compare everyone's workload and capacity in the short-term.
Advanced tip: Create a new user in your team called “1 – New Client Queue”. Any new work items for newly signed clients can be assigned to this user, ready for you to drag & drop and assign to a team member who has the capacity to take that work on.
#4. To report on output by individual, team or for yourself
Dashboard name: Output Report
Filters: Completed date = This month
Columns sorted by: Assignee
Keep tabs on team output by viewing all the work items that were recently completed by each staff member. The estimated time in each column shows an aggregated length of time that was initially estimated for each individual’s completed work items.
This is a flexible dashboard you can customize for different teams, time periods, or to monitor how many jobs you have checked off yourself.
#5. To plan your own day
Dashboard name: My Work
Filters: Assignee = <Your Name>
Columns sorted by: Due Date
An essential dashboard for each team member to save and check daily. Cut out everything else, leaving just the work items that you are responsible for seeing through to completion.
Sorting based on due date will help you plan your day and prepare for what’s coming up. You can also view how much time has been estimated for each period, and prioritize accordingly.
Some other tips for creating your perfect dashboards
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Don't be afraid to apply multiple filters on top of one another to filter out noise and narrow in on the exact work items that are relevant to what you want to see. There is no limit to the number of filters that can be applied to a work view.
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Once you are happy with a dashboard you have created, remember to Save As New, so you can come back to it again.
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Watch this short video of our VP Sales, Tim setting up some of his favorite dashboards
Let us know in the comments what customized dashboards you most use!