AnyKanban documentation

Guides for the boards Azure Boards cannot give you, step-by-step scenarios for everyday tasks, concepts explaining why the board behaves as it does, and a security and data handling page written for a reviewer rather than a developer.

• Start hereAnyKanban is an Azure DevOps extension that turns any saved work item query into an interactive Kanban board and a reorderable, backlog-style list, including work item types that native…
• AnyKanban User GuideAnyKanban is an Azure DevOps extension that turns any saved work item query, whether a flat list, a tree, or a "work items and direct links" query, into a fully interactive Kanban board and…
• PrerequisitesThis guide is for organization and project administrators preparing an Azure DevOps organization for AnyKanban.
• A board for what the business asked forA backlog answers how work gets built. It does not answer what the business asked for, and it was never meant to: a backlog item is a unit of delivery, sized and ordered so a team can commit…
• A board for types that never reach a backlogSupport requests, customer feedback, impediments, risks and test cases are real work with real states, and none of them appear on any backlog.
• One board across several projectsA regulatory program rarely respects project boundaries. The same change lands in Claims Platform, Core Insurance and Digital Banking at once, and the person accountable for it needs one…
• One board across several teams' sprintsTwo teams are working on the same program, each in its own sprint, on its own schedule. The delivery manager wants a single board showing what both are working on right now, and every Monday…
• A board for bugs when bugs are configured as tasksSome teams configure Azure DevOps so that bugs are managed with tasks rather than with requirements.
• Security and data handlingThis page is written for security reviewers, architects and data protection officers assessing AnyKanban for use in a regulated environment.
• AnyKanban Technical DocumentationThis page is the developer/maintainer reference for AnyKanban (publisher id AnyKanban, extension id query-kanban), an Azure DevOps web extension that renders any saved work item query…

Get a board

Nine ways to end up looking at a board, from the thirty-second version to the one that spans three projects.

• Put an existing query on a boardYou already have a saved query that returns the work you care about: the business requests this quarter, say, from "Let customers report a claim without calling us" down to "Retire the paper…
• Create a named boardA named board is the one other people open: it lives in the hub, it keeps its own configuration, meaning WIP limits, colors, split columns and swimlanes, and it has a stable link.
• Build a board across several projectsThe regulatory program lands in Claims Platform, Core Insurance and Digital Banking at once: Regulatory reporting: claims data extract, Regulatory reporting: settlement event feed, Sanctions…
• Build a board for types that never reach a backlogSupport requests, customer feedback, impediments and risks are real work with real states: Kestrel Logistics: claim 2026-04417 stuck after adjuster upload, Brokers find the flood exclusion…
• Build a board for bugs when bugs are tasksIn Digital Banking, the Payments Incidents team manages bugs as tasks. Its defects never reach that team's requirement backlog, so the team has no bug board: Instant payment times out but is…
• Build a board across several teams' sprintsClaims Intake is three days into Sprint 41; Regulatory Reporting is halfway through Cycle 17. Two teams, two different current sprints, one program, and a delivery manager who wants a single…
• Build a board of everything under an epicThe Payments platform epic spans four teams. The stories under it live in different area paths, different iterations, sometimes different projects.
• Board another level of the same queryA named board of backlog items carries a Level selector in its toolbar, reading the level it boards under your process's own name: Epics, Features, Backlog items, or whatever your process…
• Build a board that matches a team's own boardPick New board → A team's own board, as a query, choose a team, and AnyKanban writes the query that returns what that team's native Kanban board actually shows.

Follow work through links

A card that is not a backlog item still has to answer "how far along is this?". These pages are how.

• Link a request to the backlog items that implement it"Let customers report a claim without calling us" is a business request, not a backlog item, because a backlog holds how the work gets built rather than what was asked for.
• Break work down on the card without a backlogA support request like "Kestrel Logistics: claim 2026-04417 stuck after adjuster upload" needs two or three concrete steps, not backlog items.
• See which tests cover a changeThe change request "Straight-through payout below €500" is covered by one test case, "Payout below €500 is released without a second approval".
• See exactly which items a count came fromThe card "Let customers report a claim without calling us" reaches two backlog levels. The card itself shows the one number that matters at a glance, 3/10, and the breakdown behind it…
• Read a 0/1 rollup"Tell the claimant where their settlement has got to" links one backlog item, "Show settlement status to the claimant", which nobody has broken down yet.

Move work

Changing state and changing order, with a mouse, without one, and when the process says no.

• Move an item to the next stateThe complaint request has been triaged and someone is starting on it. Drag Handle complaints in one place instead of three inboxes from Triage into In Progress: the board writes the same…
• Put a column in priority order1. Open the board. The filter bar may stay as it is. 2. Press and hold on the card Be ready for the 2027 regulatory reporting regime and start moving; the drag begins after about 4 px. 3.
• Move a card without draggingDragging across a wide board is awkward. The card's right-click menu moves the same card in two clicks.
• Move a card with the keyboard aloneNothing on the board needs a pointer. Move the change request Repricing of commercial property after the 2025 flood season from Triage to In Progress using only the keyboard, and a screen…
• Put the backlog in the order of its requestsThe business keeps its requests in order on a request board. When it moves a request up, the backlog items that deliver that request should move up too. Take priorities does that on demand.

Shape the board

Fifteen settings that turn a list of cards into a board your process can be read from.

• Cap work in progress in a columnYour team agreed that at most four business requests are worked at once. Put that number on the board, so In Progress says by itself when the agreement has been broken, instead of someone…
• Write down what a column actually means"In Review" means one thing to the person who moved the card there and another to the person who has to pick it up.
• Separate "being worked" from "ready to move on"Two change requests sit in In Review: one is still being reviewed, the other was reviewed yesterday and is waiting for whoever picks it up next. Same state, different situation.
• Give expedited work its own laneTwo support requests have breached their SLA: "Kestrel Logistics: claim 2026-04417 stuck after adjuster upload" and "Lakeshore Hospitality: duplicate payout on claim 2026-03980".
• Get one row per work item typeA board over work that never reaches a backlog mixes support requests, feedback and impediments in every column. The states are shared, but the three are not read the same way.
• Make regulatory work impossible to missTwo of the business requests on the board carry a regulatory deadline: "Be ready for the 2027 regulatory reporting regime" and "Keep complaint correspondence for the statutory period".
• Color cards by any date fieldA card carrying a deadline looks exactly like one that does not. A style rule on a date field makes it visible.
• Color the tags you actually useTags are how the demo change requests are grouped without touching the process: regulatory, reg-reporting, decommission, automation. As gray pills they all read the same.
• Choose what each card showsA card starts with the assignee and the tags. On a board that spans Claims Platform and Core Insurance, the project each change request belongs to matters more than either, and on a bug…
• Collapse the parts of the board you are not using1. On the board, find the chevron at the right edge of the first or last column's header and select it (its label reads Collapse column).
• Read a card's age at a glanceNext to every card's state there is a small counter, 5d, saying how long the card has sat in its current state.
• Put two columns over one stateYour team's board has Analysis, Development and Testing. Your process has one state for all three: Active.
• Silence a notice you have already answeredSome of the yellow cards above a board describe something that is never going to change. A cross-project board will always reach items you are not allowed to read, and it will say so every…
• Compare demand with capacity, per laneYour quarterly plan is a board whose swimlanes are the quarters and whose cards are the requests, each carrying a cost estimate.
• Get one lane per period from the iteration treeYour quarterly plan has a lane per quarter, and every quarter somebody adds the next one by hand, names it exactly as the iteration is named, and sets its condition.

Find and analyze

Getting from four hundred cards to the one you need, and reading the board as evidence.

• Find one item on a board of four hundredA broker is on the phone about a stuck claim and you need that one card. Typing kestrel into the filter bar reduces the support board to Kestrel Logistics: claim 2026-04417 stuck after…
• See which work is waiting on other workTwo change requests belong to the same regulatory program: Regulatory reporting: claims data extract cannot finish before Unify customer identifiers across policy and claims, the item it…
• Show the board as it was at the start of the monthA retrospective asks what the board actually looked like when the month began, or an auditor asks when Regulatory reporting: claims data extract moved into In Progress.
• See everything the query returned, in one listThe board is a process view: it leaves out items in removed states and diverts states it cannot place.
• Work with a column that has hundreds of cardsA support board whose New column collects every request nobody has triaged yet will outgrow what a browser should paint in one go.
• Read the board by age at the daily meetingTwelve cards in progress and eleven minutes. Rather than asking each person what they did yesterday, turn on Aging colors and walk the board from the oldest card down: the ones the board has…
• Read the Aging Work In Progress chartThe Aging WIP tab sits beside Board and List on a board in the hub, and beside Board on any query's results page, where it charts that query and, on a saved query, keeps the filter you set…
• What the chart is telling you, and what to do about itSeven shapes you will actually see, what each one means, and the move it asks for. Every picture below is a real board, seeded and then photographed, rather than a drawing.
• See what changed since the plan was setTwo weeks into the quarter, the planning group asks what is still the plan: which requests came in after the freeze, which moved to another quarter, and which dropped out altogether.
• See work that sits out of request orderThe business keeps its requests in an order on a request board. The team keeps its backlog in an order of its own.

Edit in place

Small changes without losing the board.

• Add an item without leaving the boardA request lands in the middle of a triage meeting and you want it on the board now, not after a detour through the work item form.
• Change a field without opening the itemA bug turns out to be worse than it looked, or the wrong person is on a support request. One field should not cost a dialog: click the value on the card and change it there.
• Open the real work item formSome changes do not fit on a card: an attachment, a discussion comment, three fields a rule insists on at once.

Share and navigate

Getting a board in front of other people, and moving between boards without going back to a list.

• Give a board a link you can put in a wiki pageThe change-request board spans Claims Platform, Core Insurance and Digital Banking, and most of the people who follow that program never open the Boards hub.
• Move between boards without going back to the listA process owner who keeps one board for business requests and another for change requests moves between them a dozen times a day.
• Put a board summary on a dashboardThe steering meeting looks at a dashboard, not at a board. A tile that shows how many change requests sit in each column, and opens the board itself in one click when someone asks why In…
• Copy a set of boards into another projectYou spent an afternoon getting the business-request board right in Claims Platform, with card fields, tag colors, the WIP limit on In Progress and the definition of done on In Review, and…
• Choose the board AnyKanban opensA team lead who lives on one board and visits the others twice a month should not arrive at a list, and should not have to trust that the tool remembered correctly.
• Who sees which boardsEvery board you make is for somebody. When you create a board from a template, the confirmation asks Where should this board appear?

Work with others

What happens when more than one person has the board open.

• Keep the board open during your daily meetingWhatever your team calls it, a stand-up or, if you run Scrum, the Daily Scrum, you run it off the board on the screen, and somebody always moves a card while you are still talking about it.
• Two people move the same cardTwo people watching the same board will eventually drag the same card within the same few seconds: one triages Repricing of commercial property after the 2025 flood season into In Progress…
• When Azure DevOps rate-limits youAzure DevOps meters each user against a consumption budget over a rolling five-minute window, and a busy morning can push you over it: a large cross-project board open in several tabs, an…

Concepts

Why the board behaves the way it does. Not tasks. Read these when something surprised you.

• Why a column dims while you dragThree moments trigger the question: picking a card up, opening the card's menu (by right-click or with the card's ... button), and opening the state picker on the card.
• Why some items sit in UnmappedA board is bound to one work item type. By default its columns are that type's state model: every state except the Removed-category ones, ordered by state category (Proposed, then In…
• Why rejected work is hidden but countedThe board never keys on a state's name. What is hidden is every state whose category is Removed: "Rejected" in the demo process, "Removed" on the stock Scrum types, and whatever a custom…
• What the rollup counts, and what it excludesThe requirement level, which is Backlog items in Scrum-derived processes, Stories in Agile and Requirements in CMMI, is the one backlog level that means roughly the same thing in every…
• Why AnyKanban never writes to someone else's backlogThe cards on these boards hold work item types that sit outside the backlog: business requests, change requests, support requests, risks.
• Why some things need a field of your ownNative Azure Boards lets an admin add a column that is not a state, split a column into Doing and Done, and drag cards into free-form swimlanes.
• Which version you are running, and how updates reach youAnyKanban is installed once for the whole organization, so everybody in it runs the same version. Nobody installs or updates anything on their own machine.
• Why percentiles instead of averagesEvery statistic AnyKanban computes about how long work takes is a percentile. There is no average anywhere, and no standard deviation, and that is a decision rather than an omission.