Something I appreciate about kanban boards, as opposed to something like a Gantt chart 🤮 or other calendar-based planning tools, is that you can revisit an old one from a project in virtually any state of completion, and pretty easily map it to the present if you want. You have your columns of cards and you might need to reset some “in progress” ones back to the backlog (or wherever you’re storing your “not started yet” cards). You might need to change around some of the tasks, remove or add new ones, because of new information. All normal stuff you’d have to do when re-planning any project.
With a Gantt chart, you have to do all these things plus a bunch more crap trying to fit the work streams into the current calendar with the current “resources” you have etc etc etc. The level of granularity tends to be different, too, which makes all this harder. Adapting the plan to the present is a project all its own.
I’m saying this because I’m staring at two old project plans, one with a kanban board and one with a Gantt chart (not my choice; client necessity). The kanban board was trivial to map to the present. The Gantt chart? Frickin nigh impossible. I’m just going to re-plan the project from scratch I think.
What I’d really like is some semi-automated way to convert a kanban board into a Gantt chart so that I can plan and track projects internally with kanban boards but generate and share Gantt charts when those are needed. There’s a pretty big impedance mismatch between the two styles so I don’t expect it’d be easy to do such a conversion. The tools I know of that purport to do this (including Kanboard, which I use a lot) require you to put dates on your cards, which I’m trying to avoid. I’m not all that informed about the possibilities in this space, though.