What is Kanban?

Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban visualizes the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process. The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in the process and fix them so work can flow through them cost-effectively, at an optimal speed or throughput. You can use Kanban to reduce cycle time gradually and improve your operations. Kanban Board for tickets and service requests helps you in multiple ways listed below.


How can you use the Kanban board for tickets and service requests?

  1. Visualize your flow - Holistic view of the process steps an organization currently uses to deliver work or your service. The status of tickets plays a significant role that signifies work in progress at each step.

  2. Limit work-in-progress - Limiting work in progress encourages your team to complete tickets at hand first before taking up new tickets. Thus, tickets currently in progress must be completed and marked as done to create capacity in the system so that the team can pull in additional tickets.

  3. Manage Flow - Kanban board affects how quickly work traverses from start to end (some people call it value stream). Kanban helps your team analyze the system and make adjustments to improve flow to reduce the time it takes to complete each piece of work (resolution time). 


A vital aspect of this process of observing your work and resolving/ eliminating bottlenecks is to look at the intermediate wait statuses and see how long work items stay in these “handoff stages.” Improving the ability to forecast completion times reliably is a big part of implementing a Kanban system.

  1. Setup Process Policies Explicit - Examples of explicit policies include the description of individual columns when a ticket is resolved/closed. The guidelines must be defined explicitly and visualized on the top of the board column.

  2. Implement Feedback Loops - Feedback loops are integral to any sound system. The idea of getting feedback early, especially if you are on the wrong track with your work, is crucial to ultimately delivering exemplary results and the right product or service to the customer in the shortest possible time. 


  1. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally (using the scientific method) - The impact of each change that you make can be observed and measured using the various signals your Kanban system provides you. Using these signals, you can evaluate whether a change is helping you improve or not and decide whether to keep it or try something else. Kanban systems help you collect a lot of your system’s performance data.




Kanban board for tickets and service requests

Kanban board consists of tickets and service requests arranged in columns as per status (default & custom). The sorting of tickets is based on the ticket creation date. Multiple boards can be created based on different categories of tickets and shared with agents and groups. With the Kanban board, you can reduce your resolution time and help improve predictability and quality of service.


Kanban boards can help:

  • visualize the tickets and service requests

  • improve agent’s efficiency and productivity

  • admin/supervisor to have better visibility for teams and individuals



You can easily switch from your ticket view to a Kanban view. with columns defined as status. By default, My board will be available; users will not edit this board. However, they can create their board and set the visibility.


How to create a board?

A new board can be created easily through the hamburger menu on the left-hand side of the page. You can click the new board, provide a name, and select the visibility for the board, either private or shared.



You can also apply filters such as agent, group, due by time, status, priority level, etc. Once the desired filter is selected, you can create another board based on the filter category by saving the view. There is no constraint on the number of boards made on the account and user level.


How does the kanban board help prioritize tickets?

An agent can easily stack rank tickets based on the property and within each column. An agent can move the tickets from one column to another (Essentially changing the statuses of the ticket via drag and drop.) The agent can pick up a ticket card from one column and put it in another column in a particular place as per the agent's/team's prioritization. The agent can also move tickets up to down within a column to determine agent/teams priority. 



Each card represents a ticket; agents can get a birds-eye view of the ticket info on the card, such as subject, priority level, status, assigned agent/group, etc. An agent can also change the priority level and status on the card. 




The subject line will not get truncated for agents to comprehend the information thoroughly. To get more context on the ticket agent can click on the card. The ticket summary with back and forth will open as the slider on the same page. If the agent wishes to reply or add a note, the ticket will open in the new tab for further activities. 






You can also set a column limit to ensure tickets currently in progress first should be completed before the agent takes up a new set of tickets. The agent can define the column limit. When the ticket count in the column crosses the threshold agent will see the column highlighted.