Kanban Cards & Project Timelines

[Maria_JoseMa1]

Hello,

I don't seem to find Best Practices for Cards.  Our Teams rely heavily on the use of Kanban Cards that continuos to impact the Project Timeline negatively and keeps the Project Owners out of the loop.

As Best Practice, we advise the Project Team members are told to suggest a "Commit Date" when assigned to a Task in a Project.  In this way the Project Owner gets a notification to accept (timeline gets automatically updated) or reject (Project Owner takes mediating actions). However, "Commit Date" does not seem to be an editable field in the Cards. 

As an alternative, I was looking at having the assignee edit the Task Duration in the Card (and notifying the Project Owner).  However, this Task Duration field does not seem to be available in Cards. 

What would be the best practice for Team Members to work in the Kanban Cards while communicating with the Project Owner and not affecting the Project Timeline with undesired Constraint changes?

[Kurt_Jones]

Maria,

When a card is sitting at New status, your team should have option to input planned completion date for the task.  Once your PM folks approve the date then your member switches the card to In Progress that becomes the commit date. You can customize the cards in the configuration to show the commit date on the card.  So whatever the planned completion date is when your assignee flips it to In Progress (because they are saying they are now working on it) becomes the commit date.  That date stays locked on the card, even if the planned completion date is updated by assignee again due to unseen issue, see below.  In my example, I set planned complete date at 10/17/2025 @ 12:00 am.  I then moved my task to In Progress, closed the card and reopened and the commit date is now populated. I then updated the planned completion date of task, the commit date stays set I when I first committed.   Does this fit with what you need in your flow?

[Maria_JoseMa1]

Hi, Kurt

Thanks for your reply. 

It doesn't seem that the Project Owner gets to "approve" the Commit Date and the timeline automatically changes altering the task constraint to "must finish on".  Is this approval somewhere else nowadays?

The Project Owner does get a notification (if setup) though.

Thanks!

MJ