Cayzen Technologies organized a Lunch & Learn Agile event at the Harbor House at Percival Landing in Olympia, Washington, featuring Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika.
Arun’s topic was Implementing Lean across Distributed Teams, and we would like to specially thank Mayra Pena from Cayzen who organized the event:
Arun Kumar & Mayra Pena
The event was attended by folks from Washington State’s Employment Security Department and Department of Health, among others, and there was a lively discussion.
Here are the slides from that presentation:
If you would like to see the sample Kerika board that featured in the demo, go to https://kerika.com/m/H51M
We are thrilled to announce a great new feature: Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits for Kanban Boards and Scrum Boards.
WIP Limits are a very helpful tool when you are working in a true Kanban style: where work gets “pulled” as people become free, rather than work getting “pushed” onto people before the people ready.
To understand the difference between “push” vs. “pull”, think back to that famous episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy and Ethel take up jobs at a chocolate factory, and quickly find themselves unable to keep up with all the work that’s getting pushed onto them:
This is a perfect example of the perils of “push”: as the chocolate gets prepared upstream, the work becomes ready even though the people aren’t ready for the work.
If you push work on to people who aren’t ready to take it on, you will quickly have disastrous results. (It’s funny only when it’s on TV and it involves Lucy.)
At the very least, you will have an imperfect understanding of what each person is actually doing, if people upstream in the project’s workflow simply push work downstream as soon as the upstream folks are done with it.
A pull model is different: people “pull” work and assign it to themselves when they are ready.
Each person typically has a small number of items they are juggling at any time: it may be as few as two items, depending upon the complexity of the work, but it is rarely as few as just one item.
(You nearly always want to have one “background” task ready to be picked up whenever your “foreground” task gets blocked for any reason.)
When a person is able to take on a new task, she can “pull” a card from the column to the left of her on a Kerika board.
Here’s a simple example, reflecting the workflow for a software project:
WIP Workflow Example
This project includes people with different roles: designers, developers and QA, and each group has determined it’s own WIP limits, based upon the team’s capacity and velocity.
In this particular example, we can see that the Planning & Design and Deployment columns have currently exceeded their WIP limits (and, in the case of Deployment, by a large margin!)
When this happens, Kerika alerts you to the condition by showing the affected columns with red text in the column headers:
Example board with WIP exceeded
WIP Limits as “soft limits”: Kerika doesn’t stop you from exceeding a column’s WIP Limit, but it does provide a very clear, visible warning to everyone that a bottleneck is about to form.
When bottlenecks start to form, the Project Leader should intervene and help manage the upstream flow so that the WIP Limit can come back to its acceptable amount.
WIP Limits originated in Kanban, but Kerika lets you use them for Scrum Boards as well!
To use WIP Limits, click on the Project Info button that’s at the top-right of the Task Board or Scrum Board:
In both cases, it turned out that the Google Apps Admin had previously authorized Kerika only for a subset of their Google Apps domains, i.e. for an Organizational Unit (OU).
Even when the OU has been set up to override the master settings of the domain, Google seems to be giving us an error (specifically, our server is told by Google’s authorization server that “domain policy checking failed” — this is the check that we do to see if the Google Apps domain is authorized.)
The simple fix is to authorize Kerika for the entire domain rather than a subset of users.
Naturally, our users wonder if this means they need to license all of the users registered within their entire Google Apps domain: the short answer is “No” — you need to license only those people who are actually using Kerika.
So, don’t worry about getting stuck with a big bill simply because you authorized the use of Kerika within a large Google Apps domain: all you are doing is making it easy for your colleagues to try out Kerika.
If they try out Kerika and like it, we can talk about licensing then…
The announcement by CERT yesterday that there is a vulnerability in the Bourne Shell (more commonly known as “bash”) wasn’t great news for anyone running any variant of Unix, which includes Linux and MacOS.
There are a number of variants of Linux out there, which makes things a little harder whenever a vulnerability is announced: you have to make sure your particular variant of Linux is patched quickly.
Luckily, this problem was fixed as fast as the notorious Heartbleed bug: within a couple of hours of the report of Shellshock, Amazon and Google (and, most likely, every other cloud services provider out there) started installing patches, and so the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) world got back into good shape very quickly.
In our own case, we use Ubuntu Linux, and they were equally swift in issuing a patch for Shellshock which we installed yesterday.
That’s true only in a literal sense: the vast majority of Mac users don’t ever use the Terminal program to access the shell, and a lot of permissions on Macs are locked down by default (and most users never bother exploring all their administrative privileges).
But, in a practical sense this bland statement from Apple understates the actual risk faced by Mac users: a significant majority of startups use Mac for their software development, which means a critical set of Mac users are still sitting exposed!
The sooner Apple fixes this bug, the better is will be for the startup world.
Since our last released, when we upgraded our integration with Google Apps Marketplace to use the OAuth 2.0 protocol, a number of folks have written in to ask about how they should install and authorize Kerika for their premium Google domains (i.e. Google Apps for Business, Google Apps for Nonprofits, etc.)
Here’s a step-by-step guide for the Google Apps Administrator in your organization:
First, login to admin.google.com with your Google ID. Your screen will look like this:
Google Admin Console
On the right side of the screen, you will see a link for Google Apps Marketplace, in the area marked Tools:
Go to Google Apps Marketplace
When you click on the “Google Apps Marketplace” link, you will be presented with a search box that looks like this:
Searching for Kerika
Type in “Kerika” in the search area, and you will find us!
Adding Kerika
Once Kerika shows up, click on the blue “Install App” button:
Installing Kerika
Click on the blue Continue button, and you will be asked to authorize Kerika for your Google Apps domain:
Authorizing Kerika
And that’s it! Your final confirmation message will show:
All Done
And at this point Kerika will have been authorized for your entire Google Apps domain. Individual users will be able to sign up without going through any of this hassle.
If you have any difficulties or questions with this, please email us at support@kerika.com
Ben Vaught, from the Washington State Office of the CIO, and I had the pleasure of presenting at the state’s Office of Financial Management’s Fall Forum last week, held over two days at the Thurston County Fairgrounds in Olympia.
Ben talked about the use of visual processes as part of the Washington Business One Stop initiative he has been working on for a while, and towards the end of his talk he showed some pictures of the WIKISPEED garage in Lynnwood, where I first met Ben and Michael DeAngelo, Deputy CIO for the state.
My talk was supposed to have been on Visual Management in government and administrative processes, but seeing pictures of the old WIKISPEED garage, which used to be covered with stickies on all walls (including the massive garage doors!) before the team adopted Kerika to knit together their global community of volunteers, was a wonderful throwback moment!
When it came to my turn, in addition to showing the use of Kerika for cross-agency GIS projects, such as those led by Joy Paulus, I was also able to show examples of Kerika in use by Sherri Hrubi, Danica Ersland and Melissa Wideman, who all work together in OFM’s HR Division.
Several other people presented, including Irene Hill and her design team from the Department of Licensing, Howard Cox from the Department of Enterprise Services, and Eric Gardner from OFM’s Forecasting Division.
Between 9AM and 11AM Pacific Standard Time, Google’s authentication service threw up about about 60 errors, which gave many of our users a rough ride.
The problem was that Google’s authentication servers were timing out repeatedly, showing errors like this:
Request URL: https://kerika.com/authcallback/google?code=XXXXXXXX
Request Method: GET
Status Code: 504 Gateway Timeout
There isn’t anything we can do in this situation to help our Kerika+Google users, unfortunately, since Google’s authentication service needs to be up and running in order to log in to Kerika.
The silver lining in this cloud, for now, is that this is a relatively rare occurrence.
Kerika has had a “Max Canvas” mode for a while: if you click on the green square button at the top of a task board, your view of the board would expand to take up the full browser space:
Max Canvas button
This was handy when you wanted to work on just one board: your view of that board filled up the available browser space, and you weren’t distracted by the rest of the Kerika “chrome” (i.e. the application’s menus and buttons).
What we found, however, is that most of our users work on several boards at the same time: they have boards that they created for themselves, e.g. personal Kanban Boards, as well as Kanban and Scrum Boards that their colleagues had created.
So, in reality, most people need to achieve several goals simultaneously:
They need to be able to have a Max Canvas view that maximized their view of a board.
They need to be able to switch quickly from one board to another.
They need to know when there are new (unread) updates on boards that they are not currently viewing.
To make all of this possible at the same time, we have improved our Max Canvas view, by adding a button that makes it easy to switch between different boards (including your Home Board):
New Max Canvas view
To the left of the Max Canvas button is a new Tab Switch button: clicking on it shows you a list of all the currently open Kerika boards, and this lets you quickly switch to another board without having to leave the Max Canvas view.
New Max Canvas view
This view is smart: if a board has unread updates, it’s entry shows up in orange, consistent with how we let you know that you have unread updates anywhere in Kerika.
And if a board has overdue cards, it’s entry shows up in red, as with “Sprint 43” in the example shown above.
The Max Canvas view also has a Search button built into it, so you can do searches without existing the Max Canvas view:
Search in Max Canvas view
All of this makes the Max Canvas view of Kerika much more useful than it was before, and it’s all part of our grand strategy to make Kerika more useful on iPads!
With our newest update to Kerika, we have introduced a more elegant way to show colors on cards.
The old method we employed filled in the top of each card with a selected color (which was white, by default). Here’s an example:
Old style of colors
There were a couple of design problems with our old approach:
It severely limited the palette of colors we could use, to a small handful of light pastels. Anything darker would make it difficult to read the card’s titles.
And, to be blunt, it was excessive: the colors tended to dominate the board’s view, to the point of being distracting.
Our new design is more subtle: it lets you see the colors without calling too much attention to them:
New styling for colored cards
Now, the colors appear in a “dog-eared” style, which gets them out of the way while still making it easy to see if a card is colored.
This new approach will also make it easy for us to add more color choices in the future and, in particular, to add darker and more vibrant shades, since we will no longer have to worry about having sufficient contrast with black text overlaying the colors.
Our newest update to Kerika serves up a rather long list of changes; the two big areas for improvement were:
We have updated our integration with Google Apps Marketplace to use OAuth 2.0, since Google is retiring its OAuth 1.0 implementation.
We have made a bunch of improvements for using Kerika on iPads, with the Safari or Chrome browsers. (We still need to work on Android tablets, which, unfortunately, present too much variety…)
The OAuth 2.0 upgrade and iPad improvements are described in previous posts; here we want to highlight some of the other changes and improvements we made with this new version:
We have changed the way colors show on cards, on Task Boards and Scrum Boards to make them more usable:
In addition to being less distracting, this new design will enable us to expand the palette of colors we can offer: the old design restricted us to only the lighter pastel colors.
New styling for colored cards
We have redesigned our “Max Canvas” view so that it provides the most useful display, when you need the most space available to view a large board. In particular, you can now access Search even when you are in the Max Canvas view.We have improved security, by implementing secure cookies.
We added some subtle animation effects to improve usability. (So subtle, in fact, that you might not even notice them if you are an existing Kerika user, which is just what we want.)
In terms of infrastructure and other under-the-hood improvements, we have expanded our use of JUnit automated tests and done a bunch of bugs fixes, as usual.
There’s a lot of improvements being done on Kerika, and at a very fast rate. Make sure you subscribe to our blog to keep up!
