Board (Kanban)

The Board tab is the primary execution surface in TruePPM. It presents the project’s tasks as cards in a Kanban layout and stays in sync with the Schedule view via WebSocket — moving a card here updates the task’s status everywhere.

Board layout

The board has two zones:

Backlog — BACKLOG cards live in a dedicated surface beside the working columns, not as a column of their own. Backlog is intake — undated, unrefined, not-yet-committed work — so it stays phase-agnostic and visible while you work the active board. Three layout variants are available from the toolbar’s segmented control: Rail (left-side band, the default), Drawer, and Queue.
Working columns — the committed-work columns, rendered as phase swimlanes (one lane per phase in the WBS). Columns are configurable per project — labels, visibility, WIP limits, and accent colors — and default to:

Column	Status value	Meaning	Default WIP limit
To Do	`NOT_STARTED`	Committed; work has not begun	—
In Progress	`IN_PROGRESS`	Work is active	5
Review	`REVIEW`	Work complete; awaiting review / sign-off	3
Done	`COMPLETE`	Done	—

Dragging a card from the backlog into a working column commits it (status changes to the column’s status). Dragging a To Do card back to the backlog opens a confirmation dialog — demoting committed work is a deliberate decision. Cards that are In Progress or beyond cannot be demoted to the backlog.

The legacy ON_HOLD status is kept for data compatibility with pre-0.1 projects but does not appear as a column; on the board it is treated like Backlog for drag guards.

Board cards

Each card shows:

Task name and WBS short ID
Assignee avatars (up to three, with +N overflow)
Readiness chip — idea / estimated / ready / baselined
Risk badge — count of linked active risks, colored by max severity
Blocked indicator — shown when any predecessor is not yet COMPLETE
Sprint chip — when the task is committed to a sprint
Progress ring — % complete, fills as work progresses
CPI badge — cost performance index when cost data is available (board batch 4)

Card health signal

0.4 will consolidate a card’s stacked delivery chips — float, dwell, SPI, CPI, cost — into a single worst-offender badge that surfaces the one highest-severity signal at a glance. The severity order is derived from objective delivery state, never from PM priority rank:

Blocked (⛔) — a predecessor is not yet complete, with the dependency count
Stale (⚡) — past the column’s aging threshold and stalled; escalates when it passes twice the limit
Critical path / late (⚑) — on the critical path or running on negative float
Behind (📉) — behind schedule (SPI) or over budget (CPI) when EVM mode is on

An on-track card shows no badge. Every badge carries a glyph and a label (never color alone), so the signal reads without relying on hue.

The badge is expandable, not lossy — the full chip set is one interaction away. At comfortable density (the default), hover, focus, or tap the badge to reveal the complete health chips and baseline-variance panel; the tap target meets the 44px minimum and the disclosure is keyboard- and screen-reader-operable (press Esc to collapse). At detailed density the full chip set stays inline with no badge; at compact density only the badge shows.

Moving cards

Drag a card to a new column to change its status. The status change is optimistic: the card moves immediately, and the API call fires in the background. If the API call fails, the card snaps back with a toast.

Keyboard alternative: every card’s ··· overflow menu includes a Move to… item with a submenu. Arrow keys navigate the submenu; Enter commits. An aria-live region announces the move.

The board toolbar (top of the board) groups its controls into these clusters:

Search — a card search box (see below) that leads the toolbar
Primary chips — Group, Sort, and Density popovers (card density, plus a separate backlog-card density)
Zoom — a Small / Normal / Large stepper that scales the board surface (see below)
Quiet toggles — My tasks (only tasks assigned to you), At-risk, and Cost
Layout segmented control — Rail · Drawer · Queue backlog layout variants
More⋯ overflow — collapse/expand all lanes, WIP limit chips, column Tints, EVM mode, the Columns configuration panel, and Export PDF (see below)

Search

The toolbar’s search box finds cards by title and description across the project. Press / anywhere on the board to focus it (typing in a form never steals focus to search).

As you type, matching cards stay lit and the rest dim, so the card you want stands out in place — the board never reflows or hides cards.
A chip shows the match count; clear the search with the × button or Esc.
The query is reflected in the URL as ?q=…, so a searched board is a shareable link.
Search respects your project role: results never include cards from projects you are not a member of, and the search response carries no cost or other role-gated fields.

Matching is a case-insensitive substring (searching foundation finds “Foundation pour”). Title matches rank above description-only matches. Comment search will arrive with threaded comments.

Zoom

The Zoom stepper (Small / Normal / Large) scales the board surface only — the phase-column width and the gaps between columns and cards — so you can fit more of a dense board on screen or spread it out for a presentation. Unlike browser zoom (Cmd/Ctrl ±), it leaves the sidebar, top bar, and tabs at their native size.

Use the − / + buttons, or focus the control and press the arrow keys.
Your choice is remembered per browser and survives a refresh.
Zoom is an independent axis from Density: Density controls per-card padding; zoom controls how much of the board fits on screen. The control is hidden on phones, where the mobile layout governs sizing.

Export to PDF

Export PDF in the More⋯ overflow will produce a boardroom-clean PDF of the board for a deck or a client who has no portal access — no screenshots, no copy-paste. The export is a faithful, static projection of what you currently see:

Swimlanes and columns mirror the on-screen layout: one block per phase, the same status columns.
Cards carry their title, assignee initials, due date, and key chips (critical-path marker, blocked, story points, milestone).
A footer stamps the project name, the generation timestamp, the exporting user, and the active filter / sprint context, so the artifact is self-describing.

The export honors your current view — the selected sprint scope and any active filters (My tasks, At-risk, Tech debt, search) carry through, because the PDF renders the same filtered card set the live board draws. Tall boards paginate automatically. The whole document is generated in your browser — nothing is uploaded, so anyone who can view the board can export it. The action is hidden on phones; export from a desktop.

Readiness states

Readiness is computed server-side from the task’s data, resolved in this order (highest specificity first):

State	Condition
`baselined`	Task is in the active baseline (always wins)
`idea`	No assignee and still in `BACKLOG` (unrefined, uncommitted)
`ready`	Has an assignee + at least one predecessor link
`estimated`	Has an assignee without predecessors, or was promoted out of `BACKLOG` without an assignee (committed but unowned)

idea only applies while the task is in the backlog: once a card moves to any working column, a commitment decision has been made, so it reads as estimated even with no assignee.

The readiness chip drives the card’s left accent bar color (overridden by isCritical → red).

WIP overload

When a column exceeds its configured WIP limit, the column header turns amber and a warning badge appears. See WIP Overload for details.

Sprint integration

When a sprint is active, committed tasks appear in the To Do → In Progress → Review → Done columns as normal. Sprint-committed tasks are never shown in the Unscheduled gutter on the Schedule view, regardless of whether they have a planned start date.

Sprint view

By default the board shows every committed task in the project. A scope switcher in the toolbar (next to the saved-views dropdown) will let you focus the phase columns on a single sprint:

Project — the default; all committed tasks.
A sprint — only tasks committed to the selected sprint. The dropdown lists active, planned, and completed sprints (viewing a closed sprint’s board is a legitimate retrospective read).

The selection persists in a ?sprint= URL parameter, so a sprint-scoped board is a shareable link. The backlog rail is unaffected — it stays the intake source you drag from. While viewing an active or planned sprint, dragging a card from the backlog (or another phase) into a phase column assigns it to that sprint — for an active sprint it enters the team’s scope-injection review as a pending item. A completed-sprint view is read-only for assignment.

Board cadence

Agile and hybrid projects can run their board on one of two cadences, set in Project → Settings → Workflow & fields → Board cadence (Scheduler+):

Sprint-based (the default) — the board carries the full sprint chrome: the active-sprint panel, burndown, and sprint header.
Continuous flow (Kanban) — a continuous-flow board with no sprint cadence. The sprint panel, burndown, and sprint header are hidden, and the board leans on the always-present Flow analytics panel (cycle time, throughput, cumulative flow) instead. That panel also carries a throughput forecast: a Monte-Carlo estimate over recent weekly throughput that headlines a P80 “finish in ~N weeks — by <date>” answer for the remaining backlog, so a Kanban team gets a forward delivery date without sprints or velocity. Cards still move through the same working columns.

Switching cadence is non-destructive — an in-flight sprint is preserved, not deleted, so switching back to sprint-based brings it back verbatim. Waterfall projects don’t use sprints, so cadence doesn’t apply to them.

Aging cards

Each working column can carry an aging threshold in days, configured per column in Workflow & fields (Scheduler+). When a card sits in its column longer than that threshold it gets a calm “aging” badge showing its dwell time — a quiet nudge that work is stalling. The signal is board-local: it’s visible to everyone on the board but is never rolled up into a program or portfolio metric. Leave a column’s threshold blank to use the built-in default for that status.

Mobile

On viewports below 768px the board reflows into a horizontal snap-scroll layout: each status column becomes a full-width page (scroll-snap-align: start), and swiping settles cleanly column-to-column. The phase swimlanes collapse on a phone — each column shows a flat list of its cards across every phase, so the narrow screen carries the status axis without nesting.

A dot-strip above the board names every column with its task count and a health dot, and acts as the map: the active column’s bar fills solid, and tapping any segment jumps to that column. Card anatomy, WIP limits, and the critical / blocked treatment are unchanged from desktop — only the layout reflows. The mobile FAB creates a task in the first visible column.

Permissions

Action	Minimum role
View the board	Viewer
Move cards, update status	Member
Create tasks from the board	Member