Kanban for small IT teams: seeing which tickets are waiting on users and vendors
Small IT teams, whether a two-person in-house team or a managed service provider with a handful of technicians, juggle two kinds of work: a constant stream of tickets, and slower projects like laptop refreshes, migrations and security upgrades. Helpdesk tools handle tickets well. They are often less clear about projects, and about the thing that slows both: waiting.
A lot of IT work is waiting. Waiting for the user to try the fix. Waiting for the vendor to respond. Waiting for a manager to approve a purchase. Waiting for a maintenance window.
Keep tickets in the helpdesk
Do not move your ticket queue into a board. Helpdesks are built for SLAs, user communication and history. The board is for projects and for the escalations that sit outside normal flow.
One row per project or escalation
- "Laptop refresh: finance team"
- "Microsoft 365 licence cleanup"
- "Backup migration"
- "Escalation: VPN drops for remote staff"
Columns that show who has the ball
- Mine: the team's work: image laptops, test backup restore, write the change plan
- Other: waiting on users, vendors and approvers, with names: vendor support case, manager approval for hardware, user availability for setup
- Next Steps: planned stages: rollout, training, decommission old system
- Done: completed
The Other column is where IT projects stall. A vendor case open for three weeks or a purchase approval that never came back is invisible in a helpdesk filter but obvious on a board.
Chase vendors on a rhythm
Vendor support cases can sit for days. In Axtio, actions in Other show how long they have waited and are flagged after a week. That is a cue to escalate the case or chase the account manager.
Security work deserves its own row
Patching, MFA rollout, backup testing and access reviews are easy to postpone because nothing is visibly broken. Give them a row with clear next actions. CISA's Cyber Essentials for small organisations is a useful checklist of where to start.
Keep sensitive details out
Do not put passwords, keys, IP ranges or user personal data on the board. Keep actions descriptive and store the details in your documentation or password manager.
A weekly look
Once a week, review each project row: is there a next action, what is waiting longest, and does anyone need an update? Users forgive slow projects more readily than silent ones.