Kanban board - how to visualize also work from other projects

[Pavel Zrzavy]

Hi,

we have the following Rally structure:

Main Project
     |
     Child Project A
     |
     Child Project B

Project A and Project B are in fact teams where we are using a Kanban board view that is filtered by the particular iteration unique to Project A or Project B. So basically we have two Kanban boards.

Now if Dev/QA in Project A has for some reason a task in Project's B User Story, then this information is not present in Project's A Kanban board. And vice versa of course.

Is there any way how to populate this information into each other's Kanban board - to visualize the User Story from the other team in case there is a task? Please keep in mind that Kanban boards are filtered to a particular iteration of the particular team! That is important because all my attempts to solve this failed just because of this.

Thanks for your help in advance.
Pavel

[Matt Seitz]

As a workaround, could you do something like one of the following?

If Project A has a task in Project B's User Story

Option 1: Predecessor/Successor User Stories

1. Create a new User Story in Project A
2. Move the Project A Task from the Project B User Story to the Project A User Story
3. Mark the Project A User Story as a Predecessor of the Project B User Story

Option 2: Parent/Child User Stories

1. Create a new parent User Story in Project B. Make the current Project B User Story a child of the new parent User Story
2. Create a new User Story in Project A
3. Move the Project A Task from the Project B User Story to the Project A User Story
4. Mark the Project A User Story a child of the parent Project B User Story

[Pavel Zrzavy]

Hi Matt,

thank you for your reply. I know what you mean. This is a known workaround that leads to having 2 User Stories for the same thing one for each project. That is something we wanted to avoid. We were rather thinking if the Kanban board can be adjusted in some way to work only with one User Story but the task in it for the other team will be visible on other Kanban boards.

I was also thinking to use 'Main project' to have a Kanban board there and to project User Stories from Project A and Project B, but the problem is with the iterations filtering which is unique to each Project.

Anyway, thank you for your effort in helping us!

Regards

Pavel

[James Ifill]

Another option is to create dependencies between stories and not divide the work between teams at task level… 

Project A has a story which is dependent on Project B.

With my SM hat on, each story should be able to be independent enough to be completed within the actual team estimating the work ideally not outside the team.

Should there be a dependency between work items, the task level might be too granular to share for the completion of the story.

Hope that helps.