A long (45 minutes) video of the presentation that Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, made at the Lean Transformation Conference last October, anticipating the need for accommodating remote and virtual teams.
A long (45 minutes) video of the presentation that Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, made at the Lean Transformation Conference last October, anticipating the need for accommodating remote and virtual teams.
We are transitioning our Scrum Board users to Task Boards: the Scrum Boards are used only by a tiny portion of our user base, who overwhelmingly prefer using Task Boards and Whiteboards.
For many years now we have offered both Task Boards and Scrum Boards, but the relative popularity (and implied usefulness) of these two are lopsidedly in favor of Task Boards.
The main difference between Task Boards and Scrum Boards has been the use of a shared Backlog: a column of cards that can be shared by several Scrum Boards at the same time.
In Scrum Boards, the Backlog appeared fixed in the leftmost column of the board, and like Done and Trash, it couldn’t be be moved, renamed or deleted.
The Backlog was “live” all the time in the sense that any change made by one attached Scrum Board to the Backlog was immediately reflected in every other Scrum Board that was attached to the same Backlog. If Scrum Board A added a card to a shared Backlog, it immediately showed up in the Backlog column when viewed by Scrum Board B and Scrum Board C.
This wasn’t a good way to implement Scrum Boards, as we found out ourselves during our internal use of these boards. It’s principle weakness was it led to a proliferation of Scrum Boards, since each Sprint required a new Backlog. (Our own development team is currently on Sprint 180 so we experienced this proliferation early on.)
We though the general feature in Kerika that lets accounts archive old boards would help, but this just pushed the proliferation problem to another area; it didn’t really fix it.
We are just going to have Task Boards (and Whiteboards) from now on. At some point in the future we may completely rethink, redesign, and rebuild a new kind of scrum boards, but it doesn’t make sense for us to continue offering the current version.
As a consequence, all existing Scrum Boards will be converted into Task Boards. Here’s how that would work:
Consider an existing set of boards that all use the same shared Backlog: Board A, Board B, and Board C.
Right now all three boards see the same Backlog, at the same time: if cards are added or moved away from the shared Backlog by any board, this view is immediately updated for all three boards.
When we transform Scrum Boards to Task Boards, each of Boards A, B, and C will have its own local copy of the Backlog.
From this point on, any changes made by any of these boards to their local copies of the Backlog will not affect the copies that were made for the other boards. Each board, then, becomes independent and can proceed on its own path, without affecting any other board since there is no longer a shared column of cards.
We have already been in touch with active users of Scrum Boards and have not heard any concerns from them about this proposed change, so we are confident that we are making the right decision. If you do have any questions, please contact us at support@kerika.com.
We have added Universiti Malaysia Sabah to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @ums.edu.my email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
We have added Cranfield University in the UK to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @cranfield.ac.uk email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
We are trying to make sure all inbound communications from our users comes to the same place: support@kerika.com.
(Previously we were also using info@kerika.com but that email is too generic to ensure we reply as fast as possible.)
Thanks.
We have improved the invoices generated by Kerika, for both online and offline billing, to include a full listing of the Account Team to make it easier for the finance/purchasing departments of our customers to track changes made to Board Teams and the Account Team.
Here’s an example:
For each person who is currently part of the Account Team, Kerika will list their name, email, role and Invited On and Joined Team dates.
Invited On is the date on which someone was added to a Board Team or the Account Team; this is also the date on which one of the Account’s free subscriptions is used up — or the Account Owner is prompted to purchase an additional subscription, if no free subscriptions remain for that Account.
Joined On is the date on which the invitation was actually accepted by the new team member, which, hopefully, is really close to the Invited Team. (Otherwise the Account is wasting days on a used subscription.)
Role is the highest role a person occupies within an Account, across all the boards where the user is part of the team. If a user is a Team Member on some boards and a Visitor on others, that person’s role will be listed as Team Member.
As Kerika gets adopted by large organizations, we were seeing a disconnect between the active users who were making decisions about adding or removing people from their teams, and the finance/purchasing departments within the same organizations who were being asked to approve invoices. This change fixes that disconnect.
We have added the The Chicago High School for the Arts to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @chiartsorg email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
We have added the Catholic University of America to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @cua.edu email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
We have added the Oakland Unified School District to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @ousd.org email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
We have been lax in updating this blog, sorry, but not lax at all in working on improving Kerika, especially for mobile browser users. We are also getting close to releasing our mobile app, which will contain the same functionality as you get today when you access Kerika on a phone, but it will be packaged as a traditional-looking app for folks that want an icon on their desktop.
Here’s a short list of things that have been improved and added in the past few months:
There’s more of the desktop functionality now available on phones as well, including: