Cards on Kerika’s Task Boards and Scrum Boards can have a status flag; this is used to communicate the state of the card to other people working on the board — Team Members and Visitors.

(These flags should reflect the current state of the card, not the importance or other attributes: that’s handled by the Tags and Priority fields, and will be covered in a separate blog post.)

Normal

This is the default for all cards: it simply means that this card has no particular status. Cards are not expected to stay NORMAL for very long: as soon as they are complete they should progress to READY or NEEDS REVIEW.

Ready (To Pull)

The concept of READY TO PULL comes from Kanban, and reflects a “pull rather than push” approach to how work is taken up when people are freed up from their current assignment.

Pull vs. Push deserves its own blog post, but the difference can be summarized as follows:

In traditional project management, with a command-and-control model that places a single project manager in charge of everything, work gets “pushed” to people, usually without any regard to their availability.

This is commonplace across all sorts of teams: for example, a QA person is assigned a card when a developer is finished with it, because the natural next step is for the card to go through QA.

The problem with this approach is that it shows an unrealistic view of the status of the entire project, and often hides the real bottlenecks within a team. In our example,