How Many Columns A Board Needs Before It Starts Lying

Someone on your team asks why a task has been "in progress" for nine days. The honest answer is that it was worked on for one day and has been waiting for a person for the other eight. Your board cannot show that, so it shows a lie.

The right number of columns on a project board is however many it takes to show every place work waits, and no more. Most teams need somewhere between four and six. Too few columns hide waiting time inside a column called in progress. Too many columns get skipped, because people drag cards two steps at a time and the extra detail becomes noise.

The real question is not columns, it is waiting

A column is only worth having if work genuinely stops there and someone else has to pick it up.

Think about a single task from request to finished. Now list every point where it sat still because it needed a different person, an approval, a customer reply, or a deploy window. Those pauses are the expensive part of your delivery time, and they are what a board is actually for.

Anything that does not represent a wait is decoration. Splitting in progress into "started" and "halfway" tells you nothing, because the same person holds it either way. A pause caused by the owner being away is a different kind of wait, and it only reads correctly if the board knows who is on leave.

How to find your number in one week

Do not design the board. Watch the work.

• For one week, every time a task stops moving, write down what it is waiting for. Not who is annoyed, what it is waiting for.
• At the end of the week, group the answers. You will usually see three or four distinct kinds of wait: waiting for review, waiting for a decision, waiting for a customer, waiting to be released.
• Make each kind of wait a column. Add one column for work actively being done, and one for done.

That is your number. If your waits gave you three kinds, you have five columns. If they gave you five, you have seven and you should look hard at whether two of them are really the same wait.

Signs your number is wrong

Too few columns

• People ask "what is it actually waiting for" and get a paragraph in reply.
• The in progress column is much bigger than everything else combined.
• You cannot answer how long things typically take, because start to finish is the only thing you measure and it hides everything.
• Two people frequently think they are both waiting for the other.

Too many columns

• Cards jump two or three columns in one move, regularly.
• Nobody can name the columns from memory.
• Some columns are always empty and nobody has noticed.
• Updating the board feels like paperwork, which means it will be done late or not at all.

The second list is the more dangerous one. A board with too few columns is imprecise. A board with too many stops being updated, and an out of date board is worse than a rough one.

The two column types people forget

A blocked state, or a flag instead. Blocked is not really a stage of work, it is a condition. Many teams do better with a flag on the card and a note saying what it needs, rather than a column that quietly collects things nobody looks at. The flag still needs a name against it, in the same way amber needs an owner.

Waiting on someone outside the team. This one usually deserves its own column, because it behaves differently. You cannot fix it by working harder, only by chasing, and separating it stops external delays from looking like internal slowness when you are reporting to people who will never open the board.

Review the shape twice a year

Your columns are a description of how work flows today. How work flows changes.

Twice a year, ask two questions in a team meeting. Which column do things get stuck in most, and is that a real bottleneck or a badly drawn line? Which column has been empty for months, and should it merge into its neighbour?

Then change it deliberately, tell everyone, and move the existing cards yourself so nobody arrives to a board they do not recognise.

Start smaller than you think

If you are setting up a board today and you have no history to watch, start with four columns: to do, doing, waiting on someone else, done.

Live with it for a month. The board will tell you what is missing, because you will keep having conversations that the board could not answer. Add a column for each of those conversations, one at a time. Boards built this way get used. Boards designed in a meeting before the work starts usually do not.