New Portfolio Lane
Kanbanize 5.11 introduces a new Portfolio lane. It allows you to have a master view of the Initiatives and their progress via work breakdown structure and Initiative/child cards linking.
The Portfolio Lane is an additional swimlane that could be activated from the Show Portfolio Lane icon at the upper side of your board interface. It has three main columns: "Requested"; "In Progress"; "Done" that can not be modified.
An Initiative could stand behind a Project/Feature/Epic story, etc., while the Child cards represent the deliverable components, which outline the Initiative and should be executed by the project team.
You can easily create a new Initiative using the +New Initiative icon.
To create a dependency between the Initiative and the cards/deliverables-> drag & drop a card from the Team Board swimlane and attach it to the corresponding Initiative or vice versa.
Upon linking the card as a child, the Initiative card flips and refreshes, visualizing the linked cards through small rectangular icons that hold information for the cards/deliverables (on hover). Each icon has a specific color representing the current card position in the workflow:
- blue stands for the "In Requested" column
- orange stands for "In Progress" column
- green stands for in "Done" column.
When you move a card (deliverable) on the Team board to the "In Progress" stage, the Initiative card will automatically move to "In Progress", indicating that the Initiative has been started. In case that a deliverable is blocked the Initiative card will be blocked too.
The Initiative has a progress indicator that shows the percentage of completed cards. The Cycle time of the Initiative and its deadline (if set) are visible too.
When all deliverables are moved to "Done, the Initiative progress indicator will become 100% and the card will move to "Done" as well.
More details about the Portfolio Lane can be found in the dedicated How to Article: Portfolio Kanban Lane in Kanbanize
Note: The system allows you to convert a card to an initiative by simply drag & drop a card and positioning it to the portfolio lane.
Copy Cards and Create Links by Drag & Drop
Kanbanize 5.11 is introducing a very easy way to copy cards and create links between cards.
If you create a simple copy of the card, press the Ctrl. key and drag & drop a card to its position on the board.
To create a link between cards, press the Ctrl. key and drag & drop a card to the card you want to relate it. From the popup window, select the type of relationship (child/relative/predecessor/successor) and the cards will be automatically linked to one other.
