Tips for Kanban Combined WIP for Jira: Best Way to Combine Columns

The way you combine columns in your Kanban board will depend on your workflow and team’s needs. However, there are some common combinations you can consider:

1. “To Do” and “In Progress“: You can combine these two columns into one to represent all the tasks that are in progress. This provides a simplified view and eliminates the need to move tasks from one column to another when they are started.

2. “Review” and “On Hold“: If your work process involves a review stage and a waiting stage before a task is considered completed, you can combine these two columns into one. This clearly shows that tasks are waiting for review before moving to the “Done” column.

3. “In Progress” and “Done“: If you want to primarily focus on the tasks in progress and the completed tasks, you can combine the “In Progress” and “Done” columns (Example, “Development::In Progress” and “Development::Done”, “QA::In Progress” and “QA::Done”,…). This allows for a quick overview of the tasks in motion and those that have been completed.

Our recommendation is to use the columns header names for the phases of the process (example: Analysis, Development, QA) and the sub-column headers for each step, in other words, something like “In Progress” and “Done”.

Remember that combining columns should be intuitive and reflect your team’s workflow clearly. Communicate and align any changes with the whole team before implementing them!

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