Category Archives: Kanban & Lean

Posts related to Kanban and Lean methodology.

When you copy and paste a project, do you want the team too?

Here’s a new feature we are adding: when you copy and paste an entire project from one account to another, you can decide whether to take the team as well.

Consider these two scenarios:

  • Alice makes a copy of a project that she owns and pastes it right back into her own account. (Why? Well, maybe she wanted to make a backup copy, or maybe the actual project was going to split into two parallel efforts and so copying-and-pasting the entire project makes sense.)
  • Bob makes a copy of a project that Alice owns, and pastes it in his own account. (Of course, to do this Bob would need to have access to Alice’s project in the first place.)

In the first scenario, the duplicated project is showing up in the same account as it was before, so Kerika assumes that the team should be copied as well: in other words, “Project A” and “Copy of Project A” will both have the same team, at least to start with although each version of the board may then change its project teams independently of each other.

In the second scenario, however, it’s a little more murky: did Bob just want to copy the cards and canvases of Alice’s project, or is he trying to actually set up the same project in his own account? It’s hard for Kerika to make a really good guess in this scenario, so the system asks you:

If Bob responds “Yes” to this question, his copy of Alice’s project will also come with all the team members who were originally working on Alice’s project.

Of course, this might mean that Bob is now adding some folks to his account team: people he hadn’t worked with before.  These people are added automatically to Bob’s account team if he wants to take the team along with the project.

Our smart highlights are now even smarter

One of the coolest features in Kerika is how well the system alerts you to changes made on your Task Boards and Scrum Boards that you haven’t seen — i.e. because you were working on another board at the time your coworkers made changes, or maybe because you were fast asleep in a different timezone!

Whenever a coworker makes any change to a card that you haven’t seen — moving the card to a different column, changing its description, changing its tags, leaving some chat, etc., the change is highlighted on the card using orange.

Smart highlights
Smart highlights

And when you catch up on that change, e.g. open the card and read the new chat, the orange highlight gets turned off automatically.

(You can also mark a card’s changes as “read”, using the right-mouse-click menu.)

These smart highlights are great for distributed teams, and indeed for any person who is involved with multiple projects because it lets you catch up on what’s changed while you weren’t looking.

Now, these smart higlights are even smarter: if a card has multiple changes to it that you haven’t seen, e.g. it has a new attachment and it has new chat, Kerika keeps track of which changes you have caught up with, and which ones you haven’t.

In this example, if you read the chat, the orange highlight of the chat icon will go away, but the orange highlight of the attachments icon will remain until you catch up on the new attachments as well.

Kerika: getting smarter every day…

Adding cards while your Tags filter is turned on

The Tags filter button, which appears on the top-right corner of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards, lets you filter your view of a crowded board by showing just those cards that match a particular tag that you are using (or a particular color coding):

Tags button
Tags button

It used to be that when you were filtering your view of the board, you couldn’t add any new cards.

The reason made sense from a technical, geeky perspective, but it proved confusing and frustrating for our users, so we have added more flexibility by letting you add new cards even while you are using filtering.

The new cards will appear as you add them to the board, and stay there until you refresh your view of the board. At that point, whether the new cards continue to appear or not will depend upon whether they meet your tags filtering criteria or not.

That sounds complicated, we know, so let’s take a look at the original logic behind not letting users add cards while using tags filtering…

In the example screen shown above, the board has a bunch of tags defined, like admin, box, bug, canvas, and cleanup.

Suppose we were using filtering, to only show those cards that are tagged bug and box. With this filtering in effect, you are going to see only a small subset of all the cards that exist on the board — only those cards that have either bug or box as a tag. (Or both.)

So, what should happen if you add a new card to the board, which isn’t tagged bug or box?

From a strictly logical perspective, this new card shouldn’t be displayed, because it doesn’t match the filter criteria you are currently using — it should be displayed only if the new card had bug or box as one of its tags.

We originally dealt with this problem by saying that you couldn’t add new cards while using tags filtering, because the new cards would disappear immediately after you had added them, which we felt would make for a very confusing user experience.

(People would likely think they failed in their attempt to add a new card, and keep trying. Eventually they might turn off tags filtering, and then find they had added many copies of the same new card.)

So, that was one solution to the problem, but it still presented a user experience challenge because many folks would forget that they had turned on tags filtering, especially if they were bouncing around between multiple boards. (Yes, Barb, we are looking at you!)

If a user returned to a board and didn’t realize that they had tags filtering turned on, they would get confused as to why they were unable to add new cards.

We thought of a couple of different solutions to this problem, including the use of callouts (those balloon-like bubbles that appear to give you hints about how a page works) but we aren’t generally a fan of callouts — too many apps misuse them to excess these days.

So we have come up with what we think is a better solution: if you are using tags filtering, go ahead and add new cards. They will show up, but if you refresh your page, your tags filtering will be re-applied, and the new cards will be displayed only if they match the tags you want to show.

Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes

At the Jan 12, 2015 meeting of the Washington State Lean Practitioners Community of Practice meeting, organized by Results Washington at the Department of Labor & Industries in Tumwater, Arun Kumar presented Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes.

Here’s the presentation on Slideshare (although most of it was actually a demo!):

The meeting was attended by dozens of Lean experts representing a huge variety of state agencies in Washington!

Lean Practitioners meeting
Lean Practitioners meeting

When Projects Get Done: Archive Them

Here’s another new feature with our latest update: when a project is done, you can drag it to the Archive column on your Home page.

Archiving Projects
Archiving Projects

Archiving a project freezes it: no one can make any changes to it while it is in the Archive, so if you change your mind and want to make some changes to an archived project, you need to drag it back out of the Archive and into your Projects column.

All the documents attached to an Archived Project are frozen: the goal here is to preserve the final/completed state of a project and all its assets, so that later on if you need to investigate a problem — or deal with a FOIA request or some other legal disclosure requirement — you can do so with confidence.

All dates, status, chat and teams are also frozen: if someone was part of an Archived Project’s team at the time the project was moved to the Archive, they will continue to show up on that project team.

If a task had a due date and hadn’t yet been completed (i.e. the card hadn’t yet been moved to the Done column), that due date stays intact.

If the project was a Scrum Board, it will continue to stay attached to the Backlog it was using at the time the board got archived: when you view an archived Scrum Board, it will show that Backlog in it’s current state.  This makes it easy to archive Scrum Boards that represent different Sprints that work off the same shared Backlog!

You can change your mind: If you need to work again on a previously archived project, just drag it out of the Archive column and drop it into the Projects column on your Home Page, and that will “un-archive” (restore) your project.

You can create templates from archived projects: if you drag an archived project and drop it into the Templates column on your Home Page, that will create a template based upon that project, while leaving the project in your Archive.

A great response at the Lean Transformation Conference

Our presentation on Distributed Lean & Agile Teams in the Public Sector at the Lean Transformation Conference last week was very well received: the presentation was given on both days of the conference, and attendees were polled by the conference organizers on whether they liked the talks, or not.

  • Session 1 (Tuesday): 100% of the attendees who provided feedback gave Arun‘s talk a thumbs-up.
  • Session 2 (Wednesday): 96% of attendees who provided feedback gave Arun’s talk a thumbs-up!
Arun at Lean Transformation Conference 2014
Arun at Lean Transformation Conference 2014

The Results Washington folks have produced a short video featuring attendees at the conference — we recognize a user or two :-)
 

Writing Status Reports: an interesting use-case for Export

Ben Vaught from the Washington State Office of the CIO has come up an interesting use-case for Kerika’s new export feature that we hadn’t considered: use it to write your weekly status reports!

Kerika lets you export cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board in CSV or HTML format: the CSV format is useful for putting data from Kerika into another software tool, like Excel, but the HTML format is designed for human consumption.

Here’s an example of a card that’s been exported as HTML:

Example of HTML export
Example of HTML export

By using the Workflow button (on the top-right menu bar), you can adjust your display to show just the Done column on a board, and then further use the Tags button to limit the number of cards that are shown in this column.

For example, you could display just the Done column, and filter the cards to show just the ones that were assigned to you.

Do an HTML export of this, and you will be able to easily cut-and-paste the output into a Word document or email, and submit your status report!

When Worlds Collide: Distributed Lean and Agile Teams in the Public Sector

We were thrilled to be part of the Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington week at the Tacoma Convention Center. Over 2,700 people attended — a sellout crowd!

Attendees at Lean Transformation
Attendees at Lean Transformation

Arun Kumar, founder & CEO of Kerika, gave a presentation on both days on Distributed Lean and Agile Teams in the Public Sector, drawing upon lessons learned, case studies and best practices from multiple state agencies and private sector firms.

Here’s the presentation:

Revisiting the (deserted) Post-It Palace

A couple of weeks ago we visited a UX team at the Washington State Department of Licensing, and took a photo of the “Post-It Palace” they had built within their cubicles:

Post-It Palace
Post-It Palace

2 weeks later, this is what we saw:

Revisiting the Post-It Palace
Revisiting the Post-It Palace

Everything is now inside a set of Kanban Boards powered by Kerika+Box!

All done
All done

Switching a board between Kanban and Scrum: a new Kerika feature

When we first started working on Kerika, it seemed to us that everyone who wanted to use an online project board fell into one of two camps that didn’t overlap:

  • Kanban users, who wanted a simple Task Board, perhaps with nothing more than To Do, Doing, and Done columns.
  • Scrum users, who wanted to share Backlogs across multiple Scrum Boards, with each Scrum Board representing a different Scrum iteration (i.e. “Sprint”).

Folks who wanted to work in Kanban-style – typically business users – seemed to have little use for Scrum, and people who wanted to work in Agile-style – typically IT folks – didn’t show much interest in Kanban.

So, we built Kerika with support for Task Boards, for Lean/Kanban users, and Scrum Boards, for Agile users.

What we are seeing more recently, however, is spectrum of usage patterns and styles within organizations:

  • A project that starts off as a Kanban Board might need to become a Scrum Board in the future: as the team works on the project, it may conclude that a series of Sprints/iterations is a better model than a continuous flow/Kanban model, and they may need to transform their Kanban Board to a series of Scrum Boards.
  • A team might start off working with Scrum Boards, thinking that Agile is the ideal model for their work, and then find that a Kanban model of continuous flow is better suited for their needs, in which case they may need to change from a Task Board to a Scrum Board.
  • A Scrum team may need to pull items from multiple Backlogs: there may be items from a Marketing Backlog and from a Product Development Backlog that need to get worked on in the same Sprint, so the team may need to switch from one Backlog to another.

This kind of flexibility wasn’t available in Kerika before — and is certainly not available in Trello, Asana, Basecamp or any other tools that compete with Kerika — and that’s exactly the problem that we have fixed with the new release!

Use the Project Info button, on the top-right of the Kerika menu bar, to switch a board from Kanban to Scrum, or vice versa:

Settings
Settings

If you check the “Use a shared Backlog” box, you can then select the Backlog you want to use for your board: if you had been working in a Kanban board, it automatically switches over to a Scrum Board.

At any time you can switch between any of the Backlogs that exist in the Account, that you have permission to access.

If you want to go back to working in Kanban-style, just uncheck the “Use a shared Backlog” box and the Backlog will disappear from view.

It’s now that simple to choose between Kanban and Scrum!