How to Use Kanban & Custom Status Workflow in Orangescrum

Gone are those days, when project management tools & Kanban boards were specific to IT and manufacturing industries only.It has turned into a fundamental need of all organizations.

Be it, Healthcare, Marketing, Construction, Product development, engineering or professional services; Project management software is integral to their overall operations.

Charles Darwin once said –

“The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.”

Any species who can adapt itself according to the recent environmental changes can survive the longest.

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Similarly, an ideal project management tool should be industry agnostic that is; it should be flexible enough to adopt itself according to the workflow of any organization.

Hence, project management software must offer Custom Workflows for increased adaptability and ease of use.

Workflow refers to the series of steps that need to be taken to complete tasks, and how tasks move through these steps.

With the Custom Task Status Workflow, you can create and track the logical life cycle of your tasks from start to end.

You can create Task Status that are most commonly referred by your teams and ones that are relevant to the project type at hand. E.g. content publishing, marketing campaigns, product launch etc.

Why do you need a Custom Workflow?

Let me explain why you would want to create a custom workflow for your projects. It will show you the precise progress of your tasks and enable greater clarity around what needs to be done next for the task completion and by whom.

With the default workflow, you can have only four statuses- New, In Progress, Resolved& Closed.

This is a standard process and works well for simplistic projects. But then each of your teams have their own project flows. One size doesn’t fit all!

When your marketing teams are driving for e.g. a “content publishing” project, they need a workflow such as – Concept, Design, Review, Revise, Approve, and Publish.

Similarly, when you implement this for your development projects, you might want to add status Under Review, QA In-Progress, QA-Complete, On Hold, Approved, Go-Live, and Closed etc.

“The workflow shows how your team works from strategy to execution to delivery.”

So creating a custom workflow allows you to adapt Orangescrum Project Management Software by all teams across your organization from development to HR,remote and creative teams alike.

Benefits of a Custom Status Workflow

Custom Status Workflow allows you to create

• A set of multiple custom task statuses
• Assign the relevant progress% for each custom status
• Color code the custom statuses
• Group them all together into one Status Workflow

“You can create multiple custom task status groups. Unlimited in fact. But you can use only one custom task status group per project.”

Essentially, the custom task status group allows you to create custom statuses tailor made for your specific project types and business processes.

The Kanban view of your project becomes lively with these custom swim lanes to take a quick check on the project progress.

How to create a Workflow?

You can create custom workflow using following steps:-

• Click Status Workflow from the left panel.
• In this page, you will have 6 pre-defined custom workflows that you can choose from. In order to create custom workflow, click Create New Status Workflow.
• Provide Status Workflow name & description(if any) and click on Add.

How to build a custom workflow?

• Click Status Workflow from the left panel.
• Click on the name of the Status Workflow.

• By default, you will have 3 statuses- New, In-progress & Closed. You can either edit the existing ones by selecting icon beside respective status or create new status.
• In order to add new status, click Create New Status.

Now provide the Status name, status type, progress% & color of choice. Once all information are added click Add

Once you have added the statuses, you can drag & drop them in order to rearrange them.

Once the required changes are done, the Workflow looks like below-

How to assign workflow to specific projects?

In order to assign workflow, you can follow below steps-

• Click + New> Project or click Create Project.
  
• In Create project form, provide project name, short name, project plan, project template
• Now, you can select the Workflow from the below highlighted field.

How to use Kanban in Orangescrum?

Once you have created the project, since Kanban is selected as Project Template, you will by default be redirected to Kanban view of the project. From there, you can create required tasks.

This is how your initial Kanban view looks-

Now in order to change the status of the task, just hold & Drag, then drop it under the desired status.

What information you can get from the Kanban view of the project?

• Status of the tasks
• Number of tasks per each status
• Assignee, Task type  & Due date of the task

Apart from this, you can also use filter to filter out the data. For example, I want to see how many tasks are assigned to Evelyn and what are statues:-

Bringing it all together!

By now you have understood the use of Custom Status workflow , how they seamlessly blend into your Kanban board & bring your processes alive.

Over 3500+ companies globally use Orangescrum task management tool to

• Implement well established processes
• Keep the teams focused on the tasks at hand
• Identify and address task issues promptly
• Streamline execution
• Hold productive status and project meetings
• Deliver projects in an organized & timely manner

Overall, Kanban feature helps you take the chaos out of your execution. Teams have better clarity of task progress and are well equipped to handle delays.

It also grants the team the required autonomy to do impact analysis, prioritize tasks to obtain better results & higher customer satisfaction.

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