Tag Archives: Scrum

About the Scrum methodology. See also Agile.

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

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, Usability, ,

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!

Lunch & Learn Agile, for State Government Employees

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, Team Collaboration, Technology, Týmová spolupráce, , ,

Cayzen Technologies organized a Lunch & Learn Agile event at the Harbor House at Percival Landing in Olympia, Washington, featuring Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika.

Arun’s topic was Implementing Lean across Distributed Teams, and we would like to specially thank Mayra Pena from Cayzen who organized the event:

Arun Kumar & Mayra Pena
Arun Kumar & Mayra Pena

The event was attended by folks from Washington State’s Employment Security Department and Department of Health, among others, and there was a lively discussion.

Here are the slides from that presentation:


If you would like to see the sample Kerika board that featured in the demo, go to https://kerika.com/m/H51M

Thanks for attending!

Arun speaking at Lunch & Learn Agile
Arun speaking at Lunch & Learn Agile

Work-In-Progress Limits: a new Kerika feature!

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, ,

We are thrilled to announce a great new feature: Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits for Kanban Boards and Scrum Boards.

WIP Limits are a very helpful tool when you are working in a true Kanban style: where work gets “pulled” as people become free, rather than work getting “pushed” onto people before the people ready.

To understand the difference between “push” vs. “pull”, think back to that famous episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy and Ethel take up jobs at a chocolate factory, and quickly find themselves unable to keep up with all the work that’s getting pushed onto them:

This is a perfect example of the perils of “push”: as the chocolate gets prepared upstream, the work becomes ready even though the people aren’t ready for the work.

If you push work on to people who aren’t ready to take it on, you will quickly have disastrous results. (It’s funny only when it’s on TV and it involves Lucy.)

At the very least, you will have an imperfect understanding of what each person is actually doing, if people upstream in the project’s workflow simply push work downstream as soon as the upstream folks are done with it.

A pull model is different: people “pull” work and assign it to themselves when they are ready.

Each person typically has a small number of items they are juggling at any time: it may be as few as two items, depending upon the complexity of the work, but it is rarely as few as just one item.

(You nearly always want to have one “background” task ready to be picked up whenever your “foreground” task gets blocked for any reason.)

When a person is able to take on a new task, she can “pull” a card from the column to  the left of her on a Kerika board.

Here’s a simple example, reflecting the workflow for a software project:

WIP Workflow Example
WIP Workflow Example

This project includes people with different roles: designers, developers and QA, and each group has determined it’s own WIP limits, based upon the team’s capacity and velocity.

In this particular example, we can see that the Planning & Design and Deployment columns have currently exceeded their WIP limits (and, in the case of Deployment, by a large margin!)

When this happens, Kerika alerts you to the condition by showing the affected columns with red text in the column headers:

Example board with WIP exceeded
Example board with WIP exceeded

WIP Limits as “soft limits”: Kerika doesn’t stop you from exceeding a column’s WIP Limit, but it does provide a very clear, visible warning to everyone that a bottleneck is about to form.

When bottlenecks start to form, the Project Leader should intervene and help manage the upstream flow so that the WIP Limit can come back to its acceptable amount.

WIP Limits originated in Kanban, but Kerika lets you use them for Scrum Boards as well!

To use WIP Limits, click on the Project Info button that’s at the top-right of the Task Board or Scrum Board:

Settings
Settings
  • WIP Limits can be set for every column on a board except for the Backlog,  Done, and  Trash.
  • WIP Limits can be turned ON or OFF at any time: turning WIP Limits OFF doesn’t cause the old values to be forgotten.

Pretty cool, huh?

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.

Our newest version: tablet improvements, Google Apps Marketplace upgrade

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Usability, , , ,

Our newest update to Kerika serves up a rather long list of changes; the two big areas for improvement were:

  • We have updated our integration with Google Apps Marketplace to use OAuth 2.0, since Google is retiring its OAuth 1.0 implementation.
  • We have made a bunch of improvements for using Kerika on iPads, with the Safari or Chrome browsers.  (We still need to work on Android tablets, which, unfortunately, present too much variety…)

The OAuth 2.0 upgrade and iPad improvements are described in previous posts; here we want to highlight some of the other changes and improvements we made with this new version:

In addition to being less distracting, this new design will enable us to expand the palette of colors we can offer: the old design restricted us to only the lighter pastel colors.

New styling for colored cards
New styling for colored cards

 

  • We have redesigned our “Max Canvas” view so that it provides the most useful display, when you need the most space available to view a large board. In particular, you can now access Search even when you are in the Max Canvas view.We have improved security, by implementing secure cookies.
  • We added some subtle animation effects to improve usability. (So subtle, in fact, that you might not even notice them if you are an existing Kerika user, which is just what we want.)

In terms of infrastructure and other under-the-hood improvements, we have expanded our use of JUnit automated tests and done a bunch of bugs fixes, as usual.

There’s a lot of improvements being done on Kerika, and at a very fast rate. Make sure you subscribe to our blog to keep up!

 

Project Info summary of your Kerika Board: a new Kerika feature

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

We are thrilled to announce a new feature in Kerika: a very useful Project Info display that summarizes of your project.

You can access this by clicking on the new Info button that appears in your Kerika toolbar, at the top-right corner of your board view:

Project Info display
Project Info display

This view is available to everyone who is part of the project team:  Project Leaders, Team Members and Visitors.

There are several sections in here: at the top is the Name and Description of the project:

Name and Description
Name and Description

The Description is a new attribute of Kerika’s boards: it lets you provide context about the project that can help orient new team members, and it can also help with your Searches in the future.

The Name and Description of a project can be modified at any time by Project Leader or Account Owner.

Next up is the Summary of the project:

Summary
Summary

The summary varies by the type of board (Whiteboards, Task Boards or Scrum Boards), but it provides useful information in all cases:

  • It tells you when the board was first created, and by whom.
  • It tells you when the board was last updated, and by whom.
  • And for Task Boards and Scrum Boards it tells you how many cards are done, and how many remain.

Since each card typically represents a work item, this is a quick way to find out how much work remains on a board, without having to count up all the cards in each column.

For Task Boards and Scrum Boards, this view also shows you how many cards are due today, due tomorrow, and overdue.

And for Scrum Boards, it shows you how many cards are in the Backlog that you are using, so you get a sense for how far along you are with the overall project, not just the current Sprint.

All Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards now have support for Work-In-Progress Limits: these can be turned on or off by the Project Leader or Account Owner:

Settings
Settings

Another huge new change: we are making it super easy to switch a board from being a Kanban Board to a Scrum Board, and back again.

Task Boards and Scrum Boards also have a new auto-numbering feature that can help you manage very large boards, e.g. if you are using Kerika for an internal Help Desk.

For both Tasks Boards and Scrum Boards, there is now a great new Export feature that lets you export cards from a board in CSV or HTML formats:

Export
Export

And, finally, you now have the option to make individual projects open to the public to view (but not change): a handy feature for open-source and volunteer-based projects like WIKISPEED:

Privacy
Privacy

Kerika @ PMI Olympia Chapter

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean,

Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, and Beth Albertson, Solutions Architect from Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services will be jointly presenting at the November 18, 2014 dinner meeting of the Project Management Institute’s Olympia Chapter.

The topic will be  Using web-based work management for distributed and agile teams.

If you are interested in project management, and are close to the Olympia, Washington area, please sign up for this dinner event!

PMI
PMI dinner