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Business, Operations & Fundraising·Lesson 9 of 49

Kanban, Task Tracking, and Tools

Use Kanban boards and digital tools to track day-to-day tasks, balance workload, and keep sub-teams unblocked.

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From Big Plan to Daily Work

A Gantt chart shows the season; a Kanban board manages today. Kanban is a project-management method where tasks are cards that move across columns representing their status. It is widely used in FRC, often via Trello, where tasks live in columns like:

  • Backlog — everything that needs doing eventually.
  • To Do — picked for this week.
  • In Progress — actively being worked, with an owner.
  • Blocked — waiting on something (a part, a decision, another sub-team).
  • Done — completed.

Why Kanban Fits FRC

Kanban is visual and lightweight, which suits a chaotic shop full of teenagers. Anyone can glance at the board and see what is in flight, what is stuck, and what is free to pick up. It also surfaces bottlenecks: if the "Blocked" column fills up, leadership knows exactly where to intervene.

Limiting Work in Progress

A core Kanban idea is limiting how many cards are "In Progress" at once. Half-finished work is wasted work, so it is better to finish three tasks than to start ten. Encourage members to pull a new card only when their current one is done.

Common Tools

  • Trello — a popular free Kanban tool in FRC; simple and visual.
  • Google Sheets / Google Workspace — for Gantt charts, budgets, and shared documents.
  • Slack or Discord — for team communication, with channels per sub-team.
  • GitHub — software sub-teams track code and issues here; the GitHub Issues/Projects board doubles as a Kanban board.
  • Notion / Asana / Microsoft Planner — heavier options some larger teams use.

Keep your tool stack as small as possible. A rookie team is better served by one Trello board and one shared Drive folder than by five overlapping apps no one keeps updated.

Daily and Weekly Rhythms

Layer rhythms on top of the tools:

  • Start-of-meeting stand-up — each sub-team lead states what they did, what they will do, and what is blocking them (under five minutes total).
  • Weekly planning — pull cards from Backlog into To Do, check against the Gantt chart.
  • End-of-meeting cleanup — update card status before everyone leaves so the board reflects reality the next day.

Business Tasks on the Board

Business work belongs on the board too: "draft sponsor thank-you letters," "finalize Impact essay," "book hotel block," "order pit banner." Tracking business tasks alongside technical ones keeps the whole organization moving in sync and prevents non-robot deadlines from being forgotten in the build-season blur.

Key takeaways

  • A Kanban board (often Trello) tracks day-to-day tasks across status columns like To Do, In Progress, Blocked, and Done.
  • Limiting work in progress prevents piles of half-finished tasks.
  • Keep the tool stack small; one board plus shared Drive beats five overlapping apps.
  • Daily stand-ups and end-of-meeting board cleanup keep the board honest and surface bottlenecks early.

Go deeper

Lesson quiz

Required

Answer all 3 questions correctly to complete this lesson.

1.What is the primary purpose of a WIP (work-in-progress) limit on a Kanban board?

2.How does a Kanban system move work compared with simply assigning it all up front?

3.What is the most basic function of a Kanban board itself?

Answer every question to submit.