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I started using a kanban board to manage things and it was working great except eventually I started to notice that there was too much intermingling between projects / systems to use one board.

Is it better to use more than one board? What do you do when there's an integration between more than one project or system or department?

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    Are you using a physical board or software? If the latter, which?
    – Sarov
    Commented Jan 2, 2020 at 21:51
  • @Sarov software, at the moment taskell.
    – leeand00
    Commented Jan 2, 2020 at 21:52
  • One board per product or process is usually the right answer. For multi-board software similar to Trello, you can look at the arguably-overpriced Favro.
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Commented Jan 3, 2020 at 1:04

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Kanban is about visualising a workflow. It helps teams to synchronise their activities and to improve their process.

Your question comes down to how best to visualise your current setup.

Advantages of a single board:

  • A single view of all workflows
  • It may highlight contention for resources between projects / systems

Disadvantages:

  • Unrelated activities may be a distraction
  • A complicated and cluttered board may be more difficult to interpret

The clearest scenario would be if you have teams dedicated to each project / system.

e.g.

Team A works on Project X

Team B works on Project Y

In this case a dedicated board per team makes sense as there is little or no synchronisation between the teams.

If, however, you have one team that works on multiple projects / systems then it may make more sense to have just one board. This would help you to coordinate the activities of the team members and to spot any contention for resources.

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