Manage team projects in the kanban board made for Google Workspace

Kanban boards are a project management system developed at Toyota in Japan in the Twentieth Century. A kanban board is organized into vertical columns, traditionally representing the stages of a project, such as “Not started,” “In progress,” and “Done.” The Japanese word “kanban” translates to “signboard” in English. In kanban project management, this refers to the individual tasks or components of the work that are represented on the board by cards. These visual cards are moved from one column to the next as work gets completed. Toyota developed kanban because they found that limiting the work-in-progress made their manufacturing process more efficient — and the board layout made clear exactly which work was currently in progress. After the turn of the century, kanban boards also became popular for managing software development projects. They continue to be adapted and customized for many different types of task and work management.

Every GQueues plan includes access to both List view and Board view. No matter whether you use GQueues Lite, GQueues for YOU, or GQueues for BUSINESS, you can view tasks however best suits your work.

In GQueues, you can customize Board view column titles to be anything that suits your work. The standard setup for a kanban board that tracks a project in progress is to use column names like “Not started,” “In progress,” and “Done,” and you can create more columns that enhance the specificity of your status updates depending on the nature of your work. (For example, a bakery tracking customers’ cake orders may expand the in-progress section to include columns such as “Batter assembled,” “Finished baking,” “Frosted,” “Decoration complete.”) However, there are many other ways to set up your board columns to suit your work. Some teams map out the days of their week, with a placeholder for work that will be deferred to the future: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Next week. Other teams use columns to track work assigned to each different member of the team to balance workload. The possibilities are endless!

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GQueues has a kanban board feature we call Board view. Any queue can be viewed in either the default List view or as a board, and you can switch between views with just one click. Sections in List view translate to columns when you switch to Board view and vice versa. In Board view, tasks appear as cards that can be dragged between columns for easier status updates and faster project management. You can add as many columns as you need to suit your workflow, and you can customize the column names, too.

No, the short answer is that Google Workspace does not have a kanban board. There is no Trello alternative in Google’s native apps. If your team uses Google Workspace and you want to use a kanban board to manage projects, GQueues is the best solution. You can use Board view in GQueues to implement a kanban board that integrates deeply with your Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and more.

Some people try to use Google Tasks to recreate this functionality, but they end up disappointed because it arranges your lists side by side, which doesn’t match the use case and leads to disorganization. Google Tasks also lacks collaboration features; it’s not sufficient for any type of team project. (If you find yourself in this situation and you want to upgrade from Google Tasks to GQueues, you can use our import tool to migrate your data quickly.)

To switch any queue between List view and Board view on the web, simply click the toggle next to the queue name near the top of your screen. Sections you create in List view will turn into columns when you switch to Board view, and vice versa: if you create a new column in Board view, it will establish a new Section if you switch back to List view.

Chat with our Customer Care Team! We’re happy to answer any questions you have about GQueues 😄