How to Organize Work in KanBo for Optimal Efficiency

Organize Work with KanBo through Board Collections

It doesn't matter if you are just a budding startup or an established enterprise, KanBo software is agile enough to accommodate all types of organizational work management.

Board Collections

The first that you should consider is your organization's workflow and operational structure so you can recreate it through board collections. This will allow you to manage a large volume of work in a more organized and coherent manner.

Board collections could be based on anything including the following:

Teams

You can create board collections based on different teams in your organization such as Marketing, Design, IT, Sales, and more.

Clients

If your prime focus is client-based, the board collections could also be created after different clients, for instance, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, etc.

Types of Clients

Another categorization could be based on the nature and type of your clients as you can separate them based on their region, size, or their importance to your business.

Business Segment/ Brand/ Product

Board collections can also be created after different industry segments, brands, and products your organization has.

Keep in mind that these are just a few examples of how you can organize and arrange your work in KanBo and depending on your organizational objectives and requirements, you can rely on a completely different set of parameters to create board collections.

The best thing about KanBo's board collections is that you can use them for a time being to assess and evaluate whether a particular work structure is adequate for your organization or not. If you feel that reorganizing your work in a different manner or based on various other parameters would be more productive and efficient, you can always do that.

Create & Design Boards for Proper Workflow Representation

To further sub-categorize your work, you have the option to create dedicated boards for each aspect of the project. The creation of boards will usually depend on your board collections.

Boards

For instance, if you have created a board collection of Teams, then naturally the boards will include different organizational teams including Sales, Marketing, IT, and more. On the same note, if you are relying on agile methodology, you can create a board collection for Sprints which will have a board for each dedicated Sprint or Project.

Boards can be divided up just like board collections based on a diverse variety of factors and parameters including:

• Type of work
• Clients
• Brand
• Region
• Teams
• Types of clients
• Products

The boards also provide a bird's eye view of your entire collection and you can prioritize and organize your work accordingly. When you have all information right in front of you, it becomes far easier to evaluate your options and ensure informed decision-making.

Once you have created all the relevant boards, it is time to design and style them to represent your organizational workflow. This requires your attention as you will need to break down projects, workflows, and operations into smaller and more approachable blocks.

This doesn't only enable organizations to manage work effectively but keep an eye on all the aspects of a certain project or process. Some of the most essential ways to design your boards include the following: status. lists and labels. We'd like to present you the posibility of tracking a revenue operation process using these features.

Gartner's definition of RevOps: "An end-to-end function based on shared data, observability, and workflow across go-to-market functions, with the primary aim of accelerating predictable growth across the entire customer life cycle."

The RevOps model represents the customer lifecycle in three main areas:

The buying process

Marketing and sales collaborate to understand, attract and engage the customer.

Own

Sales and success collaborate on product and service delivery, onboarding and use, to retain and expand accounts, driving brand loyalty.

Advocate

Success and marketing collaborate to encourage customers to become brand ambassadors and influencers who can impact prospects.

Using the grouping options on the KanBo Board, each of these areas is viewed as a customer dimension. This allows you to see all your customers from several perspectives - dimensions

Status - steps in the customer life cycle

As an example, we used steps such as: Discover, Evaluate, Purchase, Onboard, Use, Recommend. With this grouping, you can see exactly at which stage of your cycle a particular customer is. All these elements are visible within a single Board.

Lists - this is an example of customer engagement level

There are 3 main areas of engagement: Buy, Own and Advocate. By grouping them this way, you can better prepare materials and information for customers and more effectively select customer service team members who can see what level of engagement customers are at.

Labels - Industries

Another dimension is the use of labels as an assignment of a customer to a specific industry. We used industries as examples: gov Administration, Automotive, Construction. This grouping allows you to see each customer from an industry perspective in a single Board view.

Break Down Your Work Using Cards, Sub-Cards & To-Dos

After you have designed a workflow that aligns with your organizational objectives and requirements, it is time to organize a wide range of aspects of your work for enhanced visualization and greater informational visibility. For this purpose, KanBo provides a range of tools that you can rely on to break down your work into more manageable and visually communicative segments.

Cards

This is one of the elements that are at the core of organizational management as it acts as a central hub of information for different aspects of work. For instance, a board list about issues and bottlenecks can have a dedicated card for each issue so all the concerned members can view the information and status of the task at all times.

Sub-Cards

When the information volume becomes too large for a single card, KanBo allows you to further sub-categorize and organize information using sub-cards. These enable you to simplify the information and make it far more accessible.

To-Dos

This is exactly what the name suggests. It is a user-friendly feature of KanBo that enables you to keep track of everything that is underway or needs to be done. Managers can use it to monitor the progress and backlog while team members can find out what they need to work on.

Invite Team Members and Set Permissions

Now it is time to invite team members who would be working on different projects and tasks related to the board. You can invite team members at the time of board creation but further organization and categorization of work allow you to have a better idea of different job roles. This way you can assign the right kind and amount of work to the right people.

Another aspect of inviting members is defining their permissions so they can view and access only what concerns them directly. The permissions feature allows organizations to manage the flow of work while maintaining confidentiality and access in an adequate manner.

KanBo provides three different levels of permissions in a board including the following:

Owners

This is the highest level of access and authority in a board which allows owners to change settings, view all activities in the stream, visit all board sections, and manage documents, users, and labels.

Members

This is the second-highest level of permission which enables the users to see all board views and activities in the stream. They can also edit, add, and delete documents along with performing all actions on cards.

Visitors

This provides the least level of authority and access as visitors can only see views, stream activities, and sections of labels, archives, and users. They can also export the board to a file for record.

How to Create a Board in KanBo

For this example, let's assume that we need to create a webinar. Since this is a part of marketing, you can go to the Teams or Departments board group and add a new classic board for conducting a webinar.

• Click on the "+" right in the middle of the board and tap on "Add new board"
• Now specify the name of the board and choose a template. For instance, the name could be Digital as the webinar is part of digital marketing.

Once the board is created, open it and you will find a standard template with three status lists of Not Started, In Progress, and Completed. Here you can start feeding these lists with cards to start organizing your work. Since the board is about creating a webinar, the cards can be: write a webinar script, send invitations, prepare slides, run the webinar, collect data analytics.

Now you can open each card and add a to-do list for each task which further clarifies the extent and scope of work. This will allow members to gain clarity and ensure that they are putting in an effort to accomplish the right thing. After the work is created, you can invite users to the board as members or visitors. All you need to do now is drag and drop the member's icon on the corresponding card to assign them each task.

Remember that when you add people to a card, they receive notification automatically so they can start working on it in a timely manner. They also become followers of the card so all progress, bottlenecks, and dependencies can be monitored to stay ahead of the curve. If the assignee doesn't respond to the notification, they are also sent an email as a reminder.

Add Start & Due Dates Along With Gantt View for Effective Management

To assign a start and due date, you first need to drag and drop each card on the date on which you want the task to be initiated. The cards will be updated automatically to reflect the start date. If you are looking to manage all the tasks at hand in an effective manner, it is highly recommended that you rely on Gantt View.

You can add a Gantt chart by clicking on the "+" icon right next to Chat. Specify the name of the chart and select whether you want it to be personal or public.

If you just want to monitor the progress on your own, you can set it to personal but leaving it on public allows everyone to keep an eye on the updates in a highly visual manner.

Kanban

Now you will see the cards in Gantt view on their respective dates. You can drag each card to specify the starting and due date. The chart will show you the number of days you have to complete the task. You can also create a dependency in the Gantt chart to ensure everyone knows what they need to do to complete the entire project.

For this example, since we are creating a webinar, sending invites and preparing slides will be done after the script has been written. You can create dependencies in Gantt to reflect the workflow. Now you will be able to see the Start and Due dates on the card for each task.

Use Kanban View to Keep Track of the Progress

Now that you have organized and assigned all the work using KanBo Board, List, Cards, and Views, you can return back to the Kanban view to monitor the progress of each task. On top of the lists, you can see when the tasks are due. Those that need to be completed soon are orange while those in the future are grey. If there's a task that has become overdue, it will show up in red to reflect the urgency.

To get an insight, you don't necessarily need to change the view. All you need to do is click on the date and a pop-up text will show you the task that's around the corner and the number of days left for it to be completed. There are different icons for start and due dates so you can keep an eye on your priorities and manage your team accordingly.

When people start working on their respective tasks, they can drag and drop the corresponding card in the "In Progress" list to notify every concerned member that the work is underway. On the same note, once the task is done, it can be moved to the "Completed" list to let people know they need to start working on the next one.

Miscellaneous Work Organization Features

Apart from the above features, KanBo brings an extensive range of features that you can use to further organize your work according to your organization's requirements and goals.

Some of the essential features include the following:

More than One Assignees

If the task involves more than one team member, you can use the To-do list to mention other people who need to chip in. For instance, sending invitations will involve writing an email invite which could be someone else's job. You can use the To-do list to assign that particular sub-task to another person.

Views

Another highly important feature offered by KanBo is Views which basically filters work based on different parameters including Work Status, Users, Due Date, Labels, and more. This provides you with the ability to monitor work from different perspectives. You can save a view if you want to use it in the future.

Filter

As the name suggests, this feature enables you to find tasks based on a multitude of factors. You can select these parameters from the list such as due date (past, today, tomorrow, and so on) to narrow down the results and find exactly what you are looking for.

Conclusion

As you might have noticed, KanBo isn't just another work management tool but provides a complete set of features that enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to organize work relying on a wide range of versatile features. It doesn't really matter if you are operating in a technology industry or just entering a new market, KanBo offers you the features you need to ensure operational efficiency, secure infrastructure, effective communication, and seamless collaboration between teams.