[twobitshifter]

I really think complexity subtracts from the appeal of kanban. It is easy to start with cards in 3 to 5 columns and everything after that starts messing with simplicity. Swimlanes can be harmless or they can morph many boards into a multidimensional project management puzzles. It depends. Carrie and Michael can easily have their own boards instead of being in swim lanes or you can add a lane for Carrie and Michael on every project board you create. You can go into more and more levels of this until it’s no longer helpful and a headache to manage.

The previous Microsoft try at kanban added status on the card surface so that you had to set todo, in progress, done etc on the cards. This then created some sort of meta progress tracking. I found this to be too much when I just wanted columns tracking state.

[m_mueller]

How do you decide what gets placed on a specific Kanban board? In our Jira setup we use for scrum we basically have kanban boards per team (1 team = 1 jira project) for daily work in between sprint plannings. That means we basically have everything on there and swim lanes are helpful to keep track on what needs to get discussed in dailies (unassigned, high prio and not yet groomed, in progress or review and assigned to team -> Today lane; then we just have current sprint lane and everything else lane).

[twobitshifter]

For your workflow usually unassigned, to groom, in progress, review, done would be separate columns and the priority would be mapped to the order of the cards in the column.

In order of work assignment, traditional kanban is that when a person completes a task they then take the top card and work on that.

[m_mueller]

traditional Kanban wouldn't really work for us I guess since there are operational issues that can come in between development work. to give context, I work closely together with financial reporting team and they are also organized through Jira.