@Max Harper Conceptually speaking, this is really interesting. Although I’m reluctant to say I like it due to the simple fact that you’re taking inspiration from Gantt…  (I really dislike Gantt and that sort of linear project management.)

Anyway, an innovative approach in all its simplicity. I like what you’ve done Max! And Pac-Man is a funny detail. 

@Henrik Ståhl yeah - I hear yah, Gantt is a mixed bag of pros and cons.  But more than any particular methodology, I’m aiming this questioning at ANY project management layout on a board where time is represented— or even less so, any time when using a Miro board to just do project work over time (where you consciously choose where to place future work … and where past work ends up - and in what relationship to this structure does one organize their kanban… Kanban is linear, and by convention; future tasks are left and past tasks are right— (To Do, Doing, Done). Many people I see organize their project boards with the future to the right and the past to the left, and GANTT, PERT, roadmaps, fishbone; the many flavors of time-based or activity-process-based (“first we must do this, then we can do this”) planning visualizations tend to, by-in-large, be organized similarly with the future to the right and the past to the left.  
 

Kanbans that are structured conventionally with (future left and past right) make sense on their own when we accept that we have mapped the x axis to “level/stage of progress” and righter = more progressed. But, when one zooms out of a kanban to its larger context, one that is embedded in a larger board where the most progressed-upon things were things we acted on yesterday and happen to be more left than our current work - that dimensional mapping of the kanban is now counterposed to the larger mapping of progress. 

Granted, as we endeavor to convert multidimensional information into 2D positions and few-D visualizations; not all dimensional mappings in a single board will correspond, cohere or harmonize. But having the time dimension of (future-past) and/or progress dimension of (to do, doing, done) harmonize between Kanban and outer board context — seems a very low friction rearrange, with very high upside and cognitive leverage — a very low hanging fruit. 
 

Hey @Max Harper,

  Great write up and presentation. Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever worked in small teams or had the product management tools clearly separated but this has never really been an issue for me. Seeing it now side by side it’s actually very weird to consider and think I’ll transition to a “forward log” from now on.

  As an aside, I love the pros of a GANTT chart and wish Miro had a nicer way to manage timeline dependant/spatial relationships between elements.  

@Max Harper -

If you are sticking with a Scrum-style work board (and not a “true” Kanban board), another non-linear option is to use a story map and change the color of the stickies to reflect their status (e.g. yellow for not started, green for done, blue for in progress, pink for blocked). 

I do like the team’s creativity in switching the direction of the flow. When you have a team of teams with inter-related features, it can almost look like a network map when you connect the multiple work boards together!

Kiron

@Max Harper If I had to choose, I'd pick your workflow with past to the left and future to the right every day of the week.

It's actually the whole linear approach that doesn't sit right with me, the “start and end” of development. But that's another topic for another post.

(I've actually created a Build-Measure-Learn template in Miro. Might submit it to Miroverse. )

I submitted the template to Miroverse! 

https://miro.com/miroverse/build-measure-learn/

Love this @Henrik Ståhl!

Thank you @Colleen Curtis! Did you take a closer look at the example sticky notes? The whole example template is kind of an easter egg.

I always like to see some creative problem solving.   

You may be thinking about kanban differently, typically a kanban board does not refer to time or timescale that is captured in your sprint planning.  These kanban boards are visual indicator of the status of the task not its place in time and comes from a different methodology to that using gantt charts and work breakdown structure planning.

That said if it works for you and you are getting great results then 

@Jeremy Birnie The thing I’m doing is connecting the fact that Kanban and other timeline visualizations while they may not share specific time or relative time, they do share having directions equivalent to ‘past’ and ‘future’ (even though we call the future of things to do in a Kanban a “Backlog”, its really kind of a ‘front log’ in my mind … its things in front of us we have yet to take on / start. Those things we’ve done we can ‘put behind us’ … 

-- 
Now, just to get a bit weirder… 
I’ve also believed another orientation for Kanban would be: down=done(things that have been installed into the foundation, into the ground, the terra firma we now stand on… like the riveters in a sky scraper standing on the steel-trussed platform of their just-completed accomplishments, with their goals still just ahead of them, aspirational and ephemeral yet achievable, just within reach, in the heavens above. 

Hi @Max Harper 

Thoughtful take on this topic! I like the different perspective you introduce here. 

@Max Harper - As I was at the part with the picture of the steel workers and Miro Kanban board, I tried to right click and drag down to scroll/pan this webpage