Introducing Boards: plan work visually

A board is useful because it makes two things visible at a glance: what is in flight, and what is stuck. Ettex Boards is built around that rather than around decoration — five columns from Backlog to Done, limits on how much may sit in the middle of them, and the ability to regroup the same cards when the columns stop being the interesting axis.

What Boards gives you

• Five columns: Backlog, To do, In progress, Review and Done — enough to show flow without turning the board into a process diagram.
• A work-in-progress limit on Review, the column where queues actually form: three cards, and a move into a full column is refused rather than warned about.
• Cards with assignee, priority, labels, due dates and attachments.
• Regrouping: view the same cards by priority, by assignee or by label instead of by column.

The limits are the point

A board without limits becomes a list of everything somebody intended to do, which is a mood rather than a plan. A limit does something uncomfortable and useful: when Review is full, moving another card in is refused, so the only way forward is to clear a review or to explicitly decide what to drop. That conversation is the entire value. Teams that raise the limit whenever it blocks them have chosen a slower board with extra steps — the honest move is usually to lower it.

Watch Review rather than In progress. Work piling up in Review usually means one person is the bottleneck for approvals, which is a scheduling problem disguised as a capacity problem — and it is the commonest reason a board stalls while everybody looks busy.

When to regroup

1. By column, for the daily question: what is moving and what is stuck.
2. By assignee, when somebody is quietly carrying four things at once.
3. By priority, before committing to a week — it exposes the gap between what is marked urgent and what is actually in flight.
4. By label, when you need to see one workstream across the whole board.

Ettex Board suits a small team running one flow, and keeps the cards local so the board stays responsive. Where the work has to be reported on rather than moved — owners, dates, costs, history — that belongs in a register alongside, because a board answers what is happening now and a register answers what happened.