If you’re interested in means of improving your performance, and you search on the net, you cannot miss Kanban. The concept is very simple and I belive easy to implement. While I haven’t yet tried it myself, I searched for some software which will allow me to track the cards in the different swimlanes.
I have found a nice hosted solution at AgileZen which judging by their presentation movies is quite an impressive piece of work. Listen to an episode of Hanselminutes if you want a piece of the history of this application and the technique as well.
Another simple implementation of a Kanban dashboard is the One-Html-File which is straightforward and simple to understand for a beginner. So I thought to combine this nice idea of one-file dashboard (mainly a javascript page) with a blog site inorder to have a storage behind the board.
The concept is :
- 1 Create a blog site for each kanban project (eg: http://demokanban.blogetery.com/)
- 2 For each swimline in your process define acategory in the blog
- 3. For each kanban card we shall create a post onthe blog (http://demokanban.blogetery.com/2009/12/27/s1-integrate-sms-payment/) and select a category where to post it.
In order to display a Kanban board I wrote a simple javascript page which reads the RSS feed of the blog and creates a visual representation of the cards. Note that the script provided can be used with any blog as long as it follows the RSS format and follows the above concept.
You can find bellow 9 steps to transform a simple bloggingsharepoint site into a fully functional Kanban borad.
Step 1: Create ablog site on a sharepoint machine.
Step 2: Create the categories (a Ready category for each onesignifies the waiting queue)
You can type, in the name of the category the maximum numberof accepted cards. This will not limit but will have a visual inpact on theuser. To have them ordered use a number and a dot.
Step 3: Createthe posts and assign them to each category you choose.
Input at least one post in each category in order to see agood visual representation.
Step 4. Check theposts are correctly displayed in the first page of the blog
Step 5: Create a documentlibrary to store your dashboard
Step 6: Copy the following two files in this document library.
Step 7: Use windows explorer view to edit the HTML file andto change the URL property in the javascript to point to your RSS address ofthe sharepoint blog. You can find this bi right clicking on the small RSS icon 
on the first page of the blog.
The address should look like this:
url: "http://appsrv:45421/dotnet/demokanban/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List={CA1E35D6-6264-473B-849D-80851416A380}",
Step 8: Add a “Pageviewer” webpart to the first page of your blog and type in the address of thekanban.html file you just uploaded.
Step 9: Check tosee if your board looks like this
By using sharepoint you can benefit from all theinfrastructure of users, portal integration, addressability, file attachmentand others , which can provide your kanban board with all the bells andwhistles you need.
this is not the best board representation it exists but for sure it can be used to start experimenting.
The files are bellow:
jquery.js (55.91 kb)
kanban.htm (2.38 kb)
.aspx)
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