kanban

This module is providing possibilities to create issue workflows in a kanban style (see below) primary with a logic of processes (kanban swimlane), steps (slots in a swimlane) and tasks (kanban cards).

This basic data structure are handled with node types connected with entity references. So they can easily be connected to other drupal technologies especially Organic Groups (OG) to use kanban in intranet and team communication. The development is currently focused on organic groups. But it should work without this.
Together with time_tracker kanban can be used as a very flexible task manager with time tracking even for customer projects in a service use case.

Please help testing and use issues for feedback, bugs and feature requests.

Current state of this module

At time there are only basic features available to connect steps with processes and tasks with steps.
There are special links on provided task/step lists to trigger a rule for change the task-step relation. This change is done immediately if the related process confirmation and no WIP Limit (max tasks in step) will stop this. In future there will be some more possibilities to control this with some rules conditions. Currently the user connections can only be done manually. That will change in future as well as realize more activity complexity, time tracking and logging.

Future plans

There is currently a plan to do some basic changes in development which will be realized in a new branch 7.x-2.x. Especially there will be a new entity type to for swimlanes and steps in one kanban board/"table" e.g. to have limited WIP across swimlanes.
A plan to integrate activity and timetracking with a new module is dropped because "time_tracker" is nearly feature_complte for all of my ideas about that.

about kanban

kanban is a very powerful lean project management tool. Since David J. Anderson developed the kanban concept for usage in IT projects it become more and more popular in software development. But kanban can be used in much more situations. The idea is organizing any type of commitment in companies, administration or Non Profit Organizations (NPO) where tasks can wait in backlogs and users can pull a task if they have time to do something.

To limit the "work in progress" (WIP) is a very important idea in Kanban. This should not only increase the quality of work. It should help people to reduce stress. The Kanban community has chosen the name "limited WIP society" (http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/) and their motto is: "Yes we Kanban".

strategies

The major plan is to be more a framework in a technical sense and for project management (PM)
# The technical framework is just for the whole drupal web application. That means this module should not be a ready product. Maybe someone can build PM products with this.
# The PM framework means that users/teams should be able build their own workflows as the kanban idea needs.

Limiting the work in progress (WIP) should not only be possible inside the projects. It should be available user based across several teams/projects maybe with different customer projects (access limited by OG). But drupal users can work in more than one team and project but their WIP can be limited on a global level.

A lot functionality will be build on Rules, Views and Entity Reference. So the module can easily be modified and integrate with and other business frameworks like CRM Core and Commerce.

concept, development and maintenance

The module is developed and maintained by Carsten Logemann (Company: paratio.com e.K.)