How to create a Kanban board in Zoho Sprints: A step-by-step guide

The concept of Kanban boards was originally introduced by Taiichi Ohno, a Japanese industrial engineer at Toyota, in the late 1940s. His method was built around two simple ideas: make work visible and limit how much is in motion at once. The evolution of this fundamental principle over the years is now widely utilized across industries such as software, marketing, operations, and has an almost universal appeal.

That's what differentiates Zoho Sprints from the rest. It is built for Agile teams from the ground up and offers the kind of Kanban functionality most tools either oversimplify or lock behind enterprise pricing. Here's what sets it apart:

• Kanban essentials, built in: WIP limits are arguably the most characteristic component of the Kanban process yet most tools treat them as a mere soft suggestion. Zoho Sprints lets you actually enforce them by not letting you overload columns with work items beyond the set limits, even when teams are tempted to push through. Combined with swimlanes, customizable workflows, and column-level configurations, you get a true Kanban experience rather than just another glorified to-do list.
• Native Scrumban support: Zoho Sprints is built with a strong focus on flexibility. If you are running Scrum but want the visual flow of Kanban or if you are transitioning from one methodology to the other, Sprints supports both natively. You can layer a Kanban-style board view with sprint-based functionality so that your team isn't forced into a single methodology or has to start over from scratch.
• Workflow-first UI: UI is the most indispensable component of a software that can either make or break it. The entire interface of Zoho Sprints is built around how Agile teams actually work with a sleek single-page layout. Unlike conventional tools with vertical backlogs that bury items the longer they sit, Zoho Sprints uses a unique horizontal backlog movement where you move work items from the backlog to the board in the same window. This makes prioritization, grooming, and planning faster and more intuitive.
• Built-in Kanban analytics and reporting: The governing mechanism of Kanban is controlling the flow of work, and its efficacy is understood through process-specific report charts like cycle time metrics, lead time metrics, cumulative flow diagrams, burnup/burndown reports, and more. Zoho Sprints offers all these reporting capabilities as standard without the neccesisty of any 3rd party tools.
• Tightly knit integrations: A key perk of being a part of the expansive Zoho ecosystem is that Sprints offers seamless connection with other relevant Zoho tools like Desk, Projects, Analytics, Flow and more. Additionally, it also integrates with top tools in the Agile ecosystem like GitLab, Jenkins, Bitbucket and Google Workspace.

Fill in the required details and click the button to create a new workspace.

You can always change these details in the Workspace Configuration.

Step 1: Set up your project in Zoho Sprints

You can create a project in 3 different ways in Zoho Sprints:

1. If you are a first-time user, you can click on the Create Project button on the Getting Started screen itself.
2. Navigate to the Projects section on the left sidebar. Click on All to reach the All Projects section and click the +Project button.
3. Navigate to the Global Add button (green circle with white plus symbol on the right sidebar) and chose Project on the top bar. The Global Add button will always be available no matter where you are in the Sprints interface.

Once you are in the Create Project layout, select Kanban project in the second field and fill the necessary information relevant to your project.

Step 2: Define your workflow columns

The default Kanban progress flow template of To Do → In Progress → Done might fit simpler workflows, but it doesn't suffice for most real-world applications. Actual work rarely moves in three clean steps as tasks pass through multiple stages like reviews, approvals, QA, and dependencies before they're truly complete. Custom workflow columns allow you to mirror those stages as they are in your actual process, so every team member can ascertain the precise status of a work item. The result: fewer status meetings, faster hand-offs, and accurate identification of where bottlenecks form.

To create custom status columns in Zoho Sprints, head over the Settings button on top-rightmost corner of the window. In the Settings panel, navigate to the Project Settings section and click on Custom Status. Click on the +Status button on the top-right to create a new Custom Status.

Fill in the details for each and once you've added your required statuses, your board should look like this.

Step 3: Add work items to the board

Work items are the fundamental building blocks of a project. In Zoho Sprints, you have 3 types of work items: Stories, Tasks, and Bugs. Each work item card carries the details that matter: who's assigned, what's expected, what's the priority, and what stage it's currently in. As your team moves work forward, these cards become the heartbeat of the board, showing exactly what's flowing through your workflow at any given moment.

To add a new work item or update an existing one, you need to be present in the Board module. You can add a new work item in four different ways as shown above.

This is what a populated Kanban board with various types of work items looks like on Zoho Sprints.

Step 4: Set work-in-progress (WIP) limits

The concept of flow in Kanban functions on two elements, visualizing is one component and limiting the amount of spontaneous work is another. Even the best of board can devolve into a backlog of half-completed tasks without caps on how much work sits in each stage. Work-in-Progress (WIP) limits address this by putting restrictions on the number of items allowed in any single column at one time. They are based on the mathematical concept of Little's Law and keep your team from over-committing. They expose bottlenecks the moment they form, and ensure work actually flows from one stage to the next instead of stalling in between.

You can set WIP Limits in Zoho Sprints while creating a new Status column or always go to the Custom Status section in the Settings to change them for an existing status.

Step 5: Move work items across the board

Now that your board structure and work items are ready, you can start moving them across stages as you work on them. Movement of work items across the board can be done in three ways in Zoho Sprints.

• Drag & Drop: Click any empty space on the work item card and drag it across to another stage.
• Bulk Update: Click the checkbox on the top right corner of any work item and then a popup will appear on top. Click on Item Status from the Update drop-down menu.
• Global View: Click the Global View button on the left sidebar. Here you can get a bird's eye view of all your project elements. Select Work Item from Module dropdown and you will see all the work items present in the workspace. Here you can update the status through bulk update or change it from the Status column.

Step 6: Review and improve your Kanban board

• Color-code and tag for visual hierarchy: As the board fills up, visual differentiation (priority colors, work item tags) makes it more scannable at a glance. Adjust the color and tag scheme as you progress and change. A board that's color-coded for a 5-person team might not necessarily work for a 20-person unit.

• Use swimlanes as the board grows: Once you're tracking multiple work types or teams on the same board, swimlanes (horizontal rows for Bugs, Features, Hotfixes, or Team A vs Team B) keep the board readable without splintering into multiple boards. Add them when the board feels cluttered; remove them when they create more noise than clarity.
• Refine your columns over time: If tasks consistently stall between two columns, you might be missing one. If a column is never used, collapse it or delete it. The columns should reflect how work actually flows today, not how it would have six months ago.
• Tune your WIP limits based on observed flow: Limits aren't set-and-forget. If a column constantly hits its cap, the limit may be too low or the stage is under-resourced. If it never hits the cap, the limit isn't doing anything useful. Keep adjusting based on what you observe.

The boards you build today determine how smoothly your team ships tomorrow. With Zoho Sprints, you're not piecing together Kanban from generic to-do features bolted onto a project tracker. You're getting a tool built around Agile methodology from the ground up with enforceable WIP limits, customizable workflows, swimlanes, and flow analytics built in natively. It also offers seamless support for Scrum and hybrid frameworks when your team needs more than just a board.

Whether you're a five-person startup running your first sprint or a 500-person organization scaling Agile across teams, Zoho Sprints gives you the all-encompassing tool to move fast without losing visibility at a price that doesn't punish you for growing.

For a broader look at the Kanban tool landscape, have a look at our breakdown of the best Kanban software for Agile teams.