Well, the last time we saw Jason, we asked him how the wedding had gone, and he said it went beautifully!
Heather was new to the whole Kanban concept, but Kerika helped her understand all the moving parts that needed to come together just right for a great wedding, and she liked the experience so much that their house chores are now organized and managed online.
In other words, the “Honey Do” list has now gone online!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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!
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
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.
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:
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're OK with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
