A Kanban board is a popular and useful way to track project tasks. A simplified board in Google Sheets is used in this course.
Each team will create and maintain a Kanban board as a Google Sheet. The board will be used:
During the first week of your project (typically in Week 3 of the semester), you will create your Kanban board. Here's how to do that.
One person from each team will download the Kanban board template.
Immediately after downloading the template, change the name of your copy per the project deliverables section of your course's design project.
If you get the name of the Kanban board wrong, your instructors and TAs will not find it, and your team will lose marks as a result.
Go to the Config
tab of your Kanban board.
Column A
lists all the members of your team.
All
and denotes everyone on the team.Picard & Sisko
.)
You should leave the rest of the Config
tab alone.
Once you've changed the Sheet's name, put it in your team's Google Shared Folder. This will share it with your team, your TA, and the instructors.
You should check your Kanban board every few days at least.
You should never leave a team meeting without spending a few minutes verifying that the Kanban board is up to date and accurate.
This is what the board template looks like.
Key points of interest:
TO DO
tasks have not yet been started; IN PROGRESS
tasks are those that have been started but are not completed; and DONE
tasks have been completed.Config
tab, as follows:OWNER
column has a pull-down menu listing all the team members (and possible subteams) as defined in the Config
tab. Every task must have an OWNER
- some one or some group that are responsible for that particular task.STEP
column has a pull-down menu listing every step from all the stages of the design roadmap. Each task you add to your board will be associated with one of those steps.
Whenever you realize a task must be added, add it to the TO DO
lane. You can use any empty row in the TO DO
lane. When you run out of free rows, you can add one for your new task:
TO DO
lane; thenInsert > Row below
to generate a new task row.Then you can use the pull-downs and add text to the other white cells to describe the task.
When you want to move a task from one lane to another:
Remember, you can use UNDO
(the ctrl-z
shortcut) repeatedly to undo any changes you made in error.
You should never delete a task, unless having added it was a mistake. To delete a task:
Delete row
from the popup menu.See your course's weekly schedule for course-specific deadlines.
Each team will set up a Kanban board early in the semester, and share as described above.
Your TA and your instructors will review your boards regularly and raise any concerns with you any concerns that they notice.
A copy of the board will be archived securely by the instructor at the end of the semester.
You do NOT submit the board as part of your milestones and final report.