Our AI Helper just got better at creating new boards and templates: although it looks the same as before, behind the scenes it now can do Web searches to find relevant material to use for building what you need.
This means that you can now make more general requests to the AI Helper, like “make a board for me to learn about AI agents”. To build this board, the AI Helper will automatically do a Web search to find the best articles out there that cover AI agents, and then build a learning board for you.
We have made substantial improvements to the previously released AI Helper to make it more useful for anyone who wants to start a new Task Board or Template.
Creating New Boards
The AI Helper is always available when you want to start a new Task Board:
What’s different now is that clicking on the CREATE WITH AI button will open a new AI Helper pane on the right side of the window:
If you have access to multiple accounts — for example, if you are working with different organizations or companies that all have their own Kerika accounts — the AI Helper will first ask you which account you want to create the new board in.
(If you are working in a single account, which is true for the vast majority of Kerika users, the AI Helper skips this step.)
The AI Helper offers some suggested areas, as shown above. You can choose one, or simply provide more specifics about the kind of board you want to create.
In the example below the user selects the first suggested category: project management and task tracking:
Unlike our first (experimental) version of an AI Helper, the new version is much more interactive: it provides suggestions and prompts to help the user think about what the new board should do, and, in particular, what kinds of management and collaboration problems they are currently facing.
If you have something very specific in mind, you can skip the back-and-forth with the AI Helper and provide a specific request, like this example for a board that contains all the steps necessary to start a new business in Washington State:
Given a specific enough request, the AI Helper can quickly suggest a board that will meet the user’s needs:
The AI Helper doesn’t immediately create a new board; instead, if first offers a preview so the user can confirm the new board will meet their needs.
If the preview looks good, the user can ask the AI Helper to make the new board (this step can take a little time):
Once the new board is created, the AI Helper give a quick link to it:
Here’s the new board created by the AI Helper: as you can see, the AI has also created appropriate and helpful tags, assigned the work to the user (since the user hadn’t said anything in their request about working with a team), and even estimated how long each task might take and assigned due dates accordingly.
Click to see a larger image
Creating Templates
Creating templates works in the exact same way: for example, the user could have asked for a template to be created using the same reference source (Washington State’s Department of Revenue Guide for Starting Businesses).
This is what the output looks like:
Click to see a larger image
Mobile & Tablet
The AI Helper is available on phones and tablet as well; the user interface is, naturally, a little different to accommodate the more limited screenshot
Please give this a try and let us know what you think!
As folks use Kerika over a long time, and for a variety of purposes, they may end up with dozens or more Task Boards and Whiteboards in their account.
One easy way to keep your focus on the most important boards is to use the Favorites feature: the Home screen has separate tabs for Favorites and All Others:
We have made it even easier with two new filters:
Show only Active Boards: this means that only boards that are not in the Archive or have been deleted will be shown.|
Show all types of Boards: you can choose to see only Task Boards, only Whiteboards, or both.
The ability to hide (collapse) columns is very useful when a board has many columns, and not all of them are immediately important. We have now made it easier to use hidden columns: if you want to drag-and-drop a task into a hidden column, just hold it over the hidden column for a couple of seconds and the column will open to let you drop the task into it.
Did you know that you can easily rearrange the columns on a Task Board by pressing down on the column name for a couple of seconds? This makes the column “draggable” which means you can then move it easily to the right or left to change its position within the board.
Sometimes you want to mark an entire board as read, for example when you don’t have the time to catch up on all the changes that took place (and maybe you don’t care?)
There’s an easy way to do this now: from your Home screen in the Kerika app, right-click on any board card and you will find a new “Mark all tasks as read” option in the dialog that pops-up:
Cards on Kerika’s Task Boards and Scrum Boards can have a status flag; this is used to communicate the state of the card to other people working on the board — Team Members and Visitors.
(These flags should reflect the current stateof the card, not the importance or other attributes: that’s handled by the Tags and Priority fields, and will be covered in a separate blog post.)
Normal
This is the default for all cards: it simply means that this card has no particular status. Cards are not expected to stay NORMAL for very long: as soon as they are complete they should progress to READY or NEEDS REVIEW.
Ready (To Pull)
The concept of READY TO PULL comes from Kanban, and reflects a “pull rather than push” approach to how work is taken up when people are freed up from their current assignment.
Pull vs. Push deserves its own blog post, but the difference can be summarized as follows:
In traditional project management, with a command-and-control model that places a single project manager in charge of everything, work gets “pushed” to people, usually without any regard to their availability.
This is commonplace across all sorts of teams: for example, a QA person is assigned a card when a developer is finished with it, because the natural next step is for the card to go through QA.
The problem with this approach is that it shows an unrealistic view of the status of the entire project, and often hides the real bottlenecks within a team. In our example,
