Most production boards are set up on a Monday with some enthusiasm and quietly abandoned by week three. The columns are still there, half the cards sit in “In progress”, and the producer is back to asking in the group chat where the cutdowns for the property developer are.
Usually the board dies because it describes the wrong thing. It tracks projects when the team works on videos, and everything that gets stuck ends up in one column nobody reads.
In short
- Make one card for each video the client approves on its own, and keep its versions inside that card.
- Columns say who has to do what next, and the project phase lives in a separate field.
- Mark who a card is waiting on apart from its column, so days with the client don’t count against the editor.
- Start with a limit of two cards per editor across Edit and Changes.
- Walk the board from right to left in a 20-minute weekly check-in.
One card per deliverable video
Make one card for each video the client will approve on its own. The project becomes a label on the card, and each deliverable moves at its own pace.
A campaign is rarely one video. It’s a 60-second hero film, three 15-second cutdowns for paid media and two verticals for social. Put the whole campaign on one card and it sits in Edit for six weeks, even though the cutdowns were approved last Tuesday.
A good test is the deliverables list in the quote: if the video has its own line there, it gets its own card.
Versions don’t get cards. v1, v2 and v3 of the hero film live inside one card that shows which version is current, and if the file names carry a code that matches the card (a naming convention does this), nobody guesses which export belongs where.
Columns that say where the work is
A column should answer one question: who has to do something next, and what?
“In progress” fails that test. It holds the script being written and the cut that’s half done, and the producer learns nothing from it.
For most production companies eight columns are enough: Backlog, Script, Shoot, Edit, Internal review, Client review, Changes and Delivered. Steps that take an hour and that nobody waits on, like exporting, don’t need one.
Internal review is the director or producer watching before the client does, and it earns a column because that’s where a misspelled name in a lower third gets caught without anyone being embarrassed.
Changes gets its own column because rework behaves differently from a first cut, and when cards pile up there it tells you something about the brief or the review. If they quietly go back to Edit you never see the pattern, and the pattern is what takes a project to round seven.
Phase is a separate thing. The column says what’s happening this week, and the phase says where the video is in its life: planned, pre-production, production, post-production, finished. Mixing the two is how a board ends up with a column called “Post” next to one called “Color”.
Keep both. The column is for the people doing the work, the phase for whoever plans the month. Looking at the same cards by phase tells you how many videos will need a shoot day in the coming weeks, or how much is about to land on the edit team once this week’s shoots wrap.
Make “waiting on the client” visible
Keep the column for where the work is, and mark who the card is waiting on separately. A card can be in Edit and waiting on the client for the licensed music track. Waiting on someone in-house, like the director or the colorist, is a different flag.
Every board grows a column called On hold. A month later it holds the video whose script the client hasn’t approved, the one waiting on a packshot from the client’s agency and the one your own director hasn’t watched yet. Each one means chasing a different person, and the column treats them all the same.
Two things change once the flag is visible. Deadlines get fairer: if a cut sits with the client for five days, those days shouldn’t count against the editor in Monday’s meeting.
And the producer’s follow-ups turn into a filter. Everything waiting on a client, sorted by how long it’s been waiting, is that day’s list of calls.
Limit what each editor has open
An editor with six cards in Edit is really cutting one of them and switching between the rest, rereading notes and reopening projects at every swap. Kanban’s answer is the work-in-progress limit, a maximum number of cards per person in the columns where the heavy work happens.
Start with two cards per editor across Edit and Changes, and adjust after a month. When an editor is at the limit, a new job waits in Backlog and the producer decides what goes first, which beats the editor finding out on Thursday that everything was urgent.
If everyone is at the limit all the time, the studio has taken on more than it can cut, and that’s a conversation about deadlines or hiring. Swimlanes by person, one row per editor, make it obvious who is over.
What every card has to show
If you have to open a card to find out whether it’s in trouble, the board has failed.
From the board itself, a card should show the client and project, the video’s code and title, the current version, who’s on it, the due date, the time spent so far and, when it applies, who it’s waiting on.
The due date works better as two dates, the one promised to the client and an internal one a few days earlier, which leaves room for a round nobody planned.
Time spent tells you a job is over budget while you can still act on it.
A 20-minute weekly check-in
Once a week, look at the board together and walk it from right to left, starting at Delivered, because the cards closest to the end are the ones that can ship this week.
- Archive what’s been delivered.
- In Client review, anything waiting more than a few days gets the name of whoever will call the client today.
- In Edit and Changes, check each editor against the limit.
- Cards without an owner or a due date get both before the meeting ends.
- Anything that hasn’t moved in two weeks gets a decision: move it forward, split it or send it back to Backlog.
The rest of the week, people update their own cards as soon as something changes, so the meeting can stay about decisions.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview each video is a task, and every version you upload stacks inside it. The card on the board shows the client and project, the video code, the title with the current version, the phase, what the video is waiting on, the people working on it, the time tracked and the due date.
The timer is on the card too, one click to start and one to stop, and starting a new one stops the one you had running.
The columns are your workspace’s statuses. A new workspace starts with To start, In progress, Finishing, In review and Delivered. Admins can add, rename, reorder and recolor columns and choose which ones count as done, under Workflow in the workspace settings.
The board can switch its columns between status, project phase and what the video is waiting on, and dragging a card in the phase or waiting view changes that field.
There’s no hard work-in-progress limit, but swimlanes by assignee show who’s holding too much.
“Waiting on” is a blocker with a client or internal category and an optional default person responsible. Sending a version to the client from the review page marks the card as waiting on the client.
Each task can have an internal deadline next to the client’s, and by default, while a client blocker is on, the internal one’s clock stops and the due date on the card shows a pause icon.
The date promised to the client never moves, and while the video is with the client it stays out of the overdue count.
Much of the card movement can run on workflow automations. Rules start from events such as a status change, a video upload, a new comment or a blocker added or removed, and they can change the status, phase or blocker, create subtasks, send an email or call a webhook.
The Video Production, Agency and Simple presets come with rules already on: starting the timer on a card in To start moves it to In progress, an approval sends it to Delivered and the Finished phase, and a request for changes takes the client blocker off and puts the card back in To start. More on the project management page.
