It’s been a while since we were using Thoughtworks Mingle as our agile project management tool. We liked their Kanban style Card Walls View a lot.
Nevertheless, we switched to PivotalTracker because of its superior support of prioritizing stories in a backlog and automated iteration planning. Unfortunately, PivotalTracker does not offer any Kanban style card wall view. Interestingly enough, Mingle has now caught up and is offering the possibility to “Prioritize and rearrange by drag-n-drop to reflect the actual order of execution of your stories“.
Kanban FTW
Two major players in the agile project management tools space have recently released Kanban support: VerisionOne and TargetProcess. While I still prefer simple tools like my favorite Zen by the great guys over at agilezen.com, it’s good to see that there’s a choice. If you have to run a big enterprise with tons of agile projects going on in parallel, you’re definitely better suited with one of the big ships.
What are your experiences with Kanban? Did you miss tool support? Or do you prefer a physical Kanban board? Let us know in the comments!
Agile Web Operations 
Check out radtrack http://radtrack.com/
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Well, if everyone is colocated then a physical board makes sense. But its rarely the case that *everyone* is colocated. Invariably, even when the team is colocated, the customer, or the stakeholders or someone is elsewhere. Then you have teams that are distributed. In these cases, a proper tool is useful.
(Disclaimer: My company develops Silver Catalyst, an agile & kanban tool)
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Interestingly enough mingle has an ad on this very page!
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The mingle ad is brought to you by google AdSense – no affiliation of any sort here 😉
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Check out http://digaboard.net. We just started an open source project for kanban or scrum called Digaboard. The tool started at The Motley Fool (www.fool.com) about 2 years ago because we couldnt find a tool that could easily visualize our tasks and be used as our task board during the standup. This seems to work well for our team at TMF and figured we would share it… let us know what you think.
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Hey Guys,
I am from Bright Green Projects – so a touch biased!
Primarily we are an Agile Project Management Tool – however, the core of our application is a Kanban Wall which the team can use to track completion of stories and tasks. There are generally two schools of thought which we regularly come up against;
1) “A “tool” goes against so many of the principals of agile and kanban and is never a good solution. At all lengths colocate and use a physical board.”
2) “This is amazing! I can now work from home, share this with my team in India and can be really lazy and not get up from my desk when I complete tasks. Thanks guys!”
What we find is that when beginning work on a new project, or with a new team, a physical board really makes sense. Once everyone understands what all the lanes and status really represent – it makes sense to switch to an electronic version so you can scale and distribute.
Reporting is much easier too!
Take a look at our product if you are interested http://brightgreenprojects.com
Cheers,
Adam
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For online Kanban boards also check out http://kanbantool.com/
Slick, easy to use (whiteboard with post-it notes) and lets you concentrate on your work.
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And what do you recommend from all the above mentioned solutions?
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Even though I like the Kanban tools we still stick to PivotalTracker for managing our development.
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Kanban was implemented in my organization around July. It was a good idea for everyone. Workflow is visible, communication – much faster. Our company is using KanbanTool http://kanbantool.com/
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