Cards in the Done or Trash column, of a Task Board or Scrum Board, cannot be modified without first moving them out of Done or Trash: this is different from how boards worked before, and we made this change as part of our recent update where we introduced the concept of Archives.
Done cards
There are a couple of reasons why we did this:
It seems like common-sense: if you have deleted a card, or marked it as Done, why would you be making changes to it? If the card needs changes, or someone wants to do chat or any other updates, that card isn’t really deleted or done, is it?
It matches the behavior of Archived Projects: when you move a project into the Archive in your account, that project is frozen in its current state, and remains frozen while it is in the Archive.For symmetry and ease of understanding of the concepts of “Done” and “Archive”, it made sense that Done cards should also be frozen.
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.
Beth talked about her own background in project management — how she started off as a chemist and researcher, and gradually found her way into project management and IT over the years — and how she used Kerika to transition from a classic “Waterfall” style of project management to something more Agile.
The presentation was very well received, and she has graciously agreed to share it with everyone :-)
A couple of weeks ago we expanded your privacy choices to make it more easy for your account team to discover your projects and templates, which is something that our enterprise users had been asking for.
With the update we did this past weekend, one small change you might notice is on your Home Page: the Templates column on this page will sort all the available templates like this:
Templates you create are shown first; presumably these are the most important ones from your perspective.
Next, we show you templates created by other people where you are part of the project team.
Next, we show you templates that are being made available to you because they are being shared within account teams.
And then, finally, we list all the templates that Kerika itself offers.
When we first built Kerika, we emphasized privacy strongly — too strongly, in retrospect, particularly for our enterprise users: Kerika made it too hard for your colleagues to discover your work, since they could know about a board only if you had added them to the board’s team.
With our newest update to Kerika, we are addressing that concern: you can now make projects viewable by your Account Team.
Setting privacy on a board
If you set a project’s privacy to be “Viewable by the Account Team”, anyone who is part of your account team — i.e. all the folks that are currently working as Team Members on all the projects owned by your account — can discover it.
Our latest update to the Kerika software features a bunch of bug fixes and other improvements that are mostly under the covers, as several user interface tweaks to help improve usability.
One change you will notice right away is that when you open a card, the details dialog box has new tabs for Tags and History: this was done to make it easier for people to find these functions, which were previously tucked away within the tab for the card’s description.
Card Details
The History tab is all the way at the bottom now, where it’s easily accessible but not in the way — since History is not a frequently used function.
There are other UI tweaks: icons have been modernized and the overall look is cleaner, and the Trash column of a board now shows you when each card was deleted.
You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!
Sort By
This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:
Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:
Critical
Is Blocked
Needs Review
Needs Rework
Ready to Pull
Hold
This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.
Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.
And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.
You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.
We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards :-)
You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!
Sort By
This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:
Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:
Critical
Is Blocked
Needs Review
Needs Rework
Ready to Pull
Hold
This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.
Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.
And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.
You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.
We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards :-)
OK, so this has nothing to do with Kerika, Lean, Agile or even software for that matter, but this is a great story that we can’t help but share with the world…
Bill Sowry is a Brigadier with the Australian Army, currently posted as Defense Attache in London.
He is 53 years old. And very fit. (This bit is important.)
Bill Sowry
Many years ago, he had a tour of duty in India: he joined a long tradition of Australian officers who were selected for specialized training at the Indian Army’s Defense Services Staff College, where his local “sponsor” officer was another up-and-coming officer: Major Mohit Whig of the 2/5 Gorkha Rifles.
Here’s what they looked like back then:
Mohit Whig & Bill Sowry
Bill had a great time in India and loved the time he spent with the Whig family — Mohit’s cheerful, amiable personality had survived years of front-line action in Sri Lanka, the Indian North-East, and Kashmir.
And Bill retained a fondness for India long after leaving its shores — as he said, “you can take the man out of India, but you can’t take India out of the man.”
Bill’s family, Mohit’s family, and friends
In 1997, Mohit was killed by an IED in Kashmir: false information was fed to his unit that led to troops being sent into an ambush
Mohit was never one to “lead from behind”. His unarmored Jonga was at the head of the convoy and was blown up by a bomb.
When Mohit died, he left behind a widow and two young sons, one of whom was born with severe spina bifida, which has left him disabled for life.
And there the story might have ended.
OK, so some soldiers go on a mission in insurgent country. They get blown up. Happens all the time. No big deal.
But it didn’t, because Bill is not an ordinary soldier…
A couple of years ago, using Facebook he was able to get back in touch with Mohit’s family (Thanks, Mark Z!) and learned that Mohit’s younger son needed some critical rehab treatment to give him more independence, especially as he grew to maturity.
This treatment was expensive (£25,000) and unavailable in India, so Bill resolved to raise money for sending Mohit’s son to Australia for rehab.
And he is doing this in a truly spectacular way: a minimum of 4 pushups for every Km. of the Tour de France.
Bill has already over 15,300 pushups over 3 weeks — yes, that’s hundreds of pushups each day!
OK, remember that bit about Bill being 53 years old?
Bill is raising money using the JustGiving site: he has 4 days to go, and a final £5,000 to raise in order to meet his goal.
We have been thrilled to help Bill, and invite you to help him get to the goal line!
Beth talked about her experience in moving away from Microsoft Project to online task boards, and Arun talked about the general use of online task boards for distributed teams, Lean teams, and Agile teams, with a special focus on the public sector.
It was a great evening, with dinner served and some great Q&A afterwards!
