Tag Archives: Our Users

Posts about interesting users, and interesting use cases

Making projects viewable by the public: a new Kerika feature

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Technology, , , , , ,

Most users work on private projects: i.e. projects that are accessible only to people added to the project team.

But some folks find it useful to have their projects viewable by everyone, typically because they are working on nonprofit causes, like WIKISPEED.

WIKISPEED publicizes its projects because it helps attract new volunteers to their cause, and this is actually a pretty smart way for nonprofits to showcase their work.

Kerika has always had an option for people to have all their projects made viewable by the public, but even nonprofits, for example, may have some Kerika boards that they don’t want to share with the rest of the world.

Well, with our newest release, it is possible for the Project Leader (or Account Owner) to make individual projects open to the public to view.

A project can be easily switched from Private to Public, and back again, using the Project Info button that’s available on the top-right of every Kerika board:

Privacy
Privacy

The privacy choices are as follows:

  • Only the project team can access: this is the default setting, and it means that unless people are added to the project team, they won’t be able to view it — or even find it using the Search function.
  • Anyone, anywhere can view: this means the project is “public” — it can be found through search, and anyone who knows the URL of the project can view it. (But, they still won’t be able to make changes.)

When a project is made Public, all the documents contained within it — on all the cards and canvases that make up that board — are also made viewable to the public.

This means, for example, that if your Kerika+Google Whiteboard or Task Board is made available to the public, all the documents in that board’s Google Docs folder are also made viewable by the public.

(And Google indexes all public Google Docs, the project could be found in more than one way, depending upon who is searching for it.)

One caveat: users of premium Google Apps, e.g. Google Apps for Business, cannot make their projects open to the public, because of limitations imposed by Google.

Presenting at OFM’s Fall Forum last week

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, , ,

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.

Using Kerika with Git

Kerika, Technology,

We often get asked if Kerika has an integration with Git.  The short answer is “No”, but the longer answer is more nuanced…

We use Git ourselves for managing our own source code and other software assets.

Git was designed from the git go (ha!) to be used by distributed teams, having originated with the Linux kernel team, perhaps the most important distributed team in the whole world, so it made perfect sense for us to use it: it works across operating systems, and a number of simple GUIs are now available for managing your various source-code branches.

We simply embed the git references within cards on our project boards: sometimes in the chat conversation attached to a card, but more often within the card’s details.

Here’s an actual example of a bug that we fixed recently:

Example of Git integration
Example of Git integration

We use multiple Git branches at the same time, because we put every individual feature into a separate branch.

That’s not a fixed rule within Git itself; it’s just our own team’s practice, since it makes it easier for us to stick with a 2-week Sprint cycle: at the end of every 2 weeks we can see which features are complete, and pull these git branches together to build a new release.

So while Kerika doesn’t have a direct integration with Git, it’s pretty easy to use Kerika alongside Git, or other source management systems.

 

Tall Tales from our users: Kerika as an Agile alternative to PowerPoint

Agile & Scrum, , , ,

Another note from a user which we wanted to share with you…

Just this week we had a fundraising administrative group meeting where our people collected for a 4-day meeting.

One of my software developers attended the meeting and we were scheduled to do a 1.5 hour presentation in the last slot of the 3rd day at 3 PM.

At 11 AM that morning, while he was in the meeting, I created a Kerika project for our presentation.  I added the cards and attached screen shots and links that I wanted to present.

I messaged him in the meeting to get him to add cards to the project for IT issues that had been discussed in the previous 2.5 days so that we could address them in our session.

While he added cards, I added more screen shots to his cards and we organized and combined the cards while being in separate rooms so that by the time 3 PM rolled around, I showed up for the meeting and we did our presentation together.

It was ‘very agile’ indeed.

It probably wasn’t as polished as a PowerPoint but it was a lot more relevant as we put it together so quickly.

While we presented the different topics, we swiped the cards through the ‘Active’ and into the ‘Done’ column.

As we neared the end of our time limit, we were then able to adjust on the fly the topics that we would present with the time we had left.

Of course, we didn’t finish but it allowed us to present the most meaningful information with the time we had.

sticky-grinch

True Tales from our Customers: Adding Kerika Spice to a presentation

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, Technology, , , , ,

One of our users wrote in last night with this great story, which we wanted to share with you…

I did a one hour webinar for the software company (Software AG) that we develop all of our software with as they were impressed with the way we were using their software development environment (NaturalOne).

I threw a little Kerika spice into my presentation as it has become such an important part of our development environment and I actually used it to prepare my presentation.

Instead of preparing the presentation by myself I used a Kerika project and had my software developers contribute cards and instructions in the areas that they specialized.

While I was doing a live presentation I was referring to the cards on my other monitor and swiping them to the ‘Done’ column as I completed them.

I know you like to hear stories about how people use your software and this worked very well for this presentation.  It was recorded and I will send you a link to it once it is published.  It might put you to sleep at night, except for the Kerika part.

Global, distributed, Agile: Kerika & WIKISPEED

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Team Collaboration, Technology, ,

Global, distributed, agile: words that describe Kerika, and WIKISPEED.

WIKISPEED is a volunteer based green automotive-prototyping company that’s distributed around the world and coming together on a Kerika board to design and build safe, low-cost, ultra-efficient, road-legal vehicles.

We first visited WIKISPEED in the summer of 2012, as part of our research into the needs of distributed, agile teams.

We found huge walls covered with sticky notes:

WIKISPEED's walls

IMG_0439 IMG_0440

Dedicated volunteers….

Volunteers

And the irrepressible Mr. Joe Justice himself:

Joe Justice

Today, WIKISPEED uses Kerika’s Scrum Boards to organize itself (you can see them at kerika.com/wikispeed):

From physical to virtual

This transformation has helped knit together folks from around the world: the Kerika boards are now used by WIKISPEED volunteers in the United States, Canada, Europe and New Zealand to communicate and collaborate. A great example of how Kerika can help bring together a globally distributed agile team!

Success!

(And, by the way, Kerika was a proud sponsor of the WIKISPEED car that was built for the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Everett, Washington ;-))

Arun Kumar, with the WIKISPEED car at the Future of Flight Aviation Center

In the Spring, a young man’s thoughts turn seriously to marriage…

Technology

In the spring, a young man’s thoughts turn lightly to love…

(from “Locksley Hall,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Well, one young man’s thoughts turned to marriage. A self-professed “English code monkey” (when was the last time you saw that particular conjunction of words?) has been using Kerika to help plan out his wedding.

He lives locally, as does his fiance, but his parents live in the U.K. and his in-laws-to-be are in Texas, and so – in a very unexpected and utterly delightful use case for Kerika – this fellow has been using Kerika to plan his wedding.

We have been fortunate to share his experiences first hand, and since he is a very organized code monkey, he took a number of screenshots of his Kerika application that he has written about in his own blog. He calls it his “big fat geek wedding”!