Tag Archives: Teams

About Project Teams in general, and Kerika’s Board and Account Teams in particular.

Helping people parachute into projects faster

In many of our customers, we find there are specialists who get pulled into many different projects (boards) at the same time, to do very specific tasks.

An example would be an security specialist who is called in to do a vulnerability assessment on every development effort that’s underway within an IT organization. Or, corporate counsel who are asked to review final drafts of every contract, after everything else about the negotiation has completed.

In all situations it’s important to help new team members come up to speed as quickly as possible, but for situations where people are parachuting in to handle specialist tasks, the motivations are a little different: the specialists often don’t care about every detail of the board — which means they don’t care for most of the cards that are already on the Task Board or Scrum Board.

Instead, they want to quickly see what’s been assigned to them, get these work items done, and (hopefully) get out quickly.

So, how can Kerika help people who parachute into projects in mid-stream? By drawing their attention to what’s expected of them.

Here’s how it works:

When you invite someone to join a board’s team, their status is shown as Pending invitation in the Board Team dialog:

Pending Invitation
Pending Invitation

Kerika lets you pre-assign cards while you are waiting for the new team member to join: in the example above, Dennis could be assigned cards while the team is waiting for him to act upon the invitation.

When Dennis does accept the invitation, the Kerika welcome dialog works to guide him to a fast start in his new project:

Welcome message for invited users
Welcome message for invited users

The welcome dialog starts by giving the new team member a quick overview of the project’s state: how long it’s been going on, how many cards are on the board — and, critically, how many cards are already assigned to the newly arrived team member.

Clicking on the See My Cards button in the welcome dialog provides a fast way for the new user to see what’s expected of him/her in this new project:

Highlighted cards
Highlighted cards

This feature will be especially useful for specialists who are called in to handle specific tasks on many simultaneous projects: they won’t care about all the cards on each board, just what’s assigned to them.

Get in quick, get your work done fast, and then get out again.

Visitors can view chat on public boards

Some of our users are working on open-source, advocacy, or volunteering projects, and for these people privacy is less important than publicity: rather than hide their work, they would prefer to have as many people as possible view it, in real-time, so they can build momentum for their initiatives.

Here’s an example of a public board:

Example of public board
Example of public board

We have always accommodated such users, by offering an Anyone with link option that Board Admins can use to make their boards accessible by anyone who has the URL of that board, even if they aren’t Kerika users:

Making boards public
Making boards public

When a board is made public, all the files attached to and all the chat as well can be viewed by anyone.

As with any other Visitors, members of the public cannot make any changes.

Our latest improvement to this public boards feature has been to make the chat also viewable by anyone who has the URL of the board.

Note: a Board Admin can change their mind at any time, and revert a public board back to one that’s restricted to the board team or account team.

 

An easier way to hide or show columns

We are extending the Column Actions menu (featured in a previous post) to provide a quicker, easier way to hide (or show) individual columns on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards:

Option to hide column
Option to hide column

When a column is hidden, it’s name is shown vertically, so you can easily remember which columns you have hidden at this time.

Hidden columns
Hidden columns

Revealing columns that are hidden is easy: just click on the “eye” button and the column immediately comes back into view.

Every Team Member can decide whether to show or hide individual columns: their choices won’t affect the way other Team Members choose to view the same board.

New feature: an easier way to share boards

We have added a new feature in the Board Team dialog, to make it easier to share your board’s URL:

Board URL
Board URL (masked in this example)

This will be useful if your board’s privacy is set to Anyone can view this board, like in the example shown below:

Public board
Public board

You can now copy the Board’s URL to  your browser clipboard, and send that to someone else as an email or instant message.

If you change your mind about making the board accessible to anyone who has the URL, you can always set your board’s privacy to Everyone in Account Team or Only people on the team.

Handling the different timezones in a distributed team

When you schedule cards on a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, we offer a simple way to pick a date:

Setting due date
Setting due date

We don’t support setting a specific time (e.g. 5:00PM) along with the time: these times are generally useless in most work settings and add unnecessary complexity to the user experience.

And, yet, it’s possible that Kerika reports a specific time for a due date, like in this example:

A specific time for a due date
A specific time for a due date

So, how did happen?

Well, Kerika took note of the fact that person making that time commitment (“I will get it done today”) was based in India.

And midnight in India is 11:30AM in Seattle — at least now, with Daylight Savings Time in effect.

So Kerika shows the Indian team member’s commitment  of “I will get it done today” in terms that make sense to a colleague in Seattle:

Handling timezone differences
Handling timezone differences

11:47 AM Pacific Standard Time with Daylight Savings Time in force is 12:47PM Indian Standard Time; something that Kerika figures out automatically.

This simple, elegant way of handling timezones eliminates the frequent disagreements over “I meant my today, not your today…”

An example of the incredible attention to detail that Kerika brings to the needs of distributed teams.

Bug, fixed: handling non-English characters

This is kind of annoying and embarrassing, but a while back a bug crept back into our code that made non-English characters appear as question marks.

Embarrassing because we have fixed this bug before. More than once.

This time around the bug crept back in while we were taking care of some other feature, and unfortunately it was one of our (Chinese-speaking) users who spotted it before we did.

Our own team is multilingual (3 languages) but we work almost exclusively using English, so this was one of those rare scenarios where we didn’t use a particular feature of Kerika and so developed a blind spot.

Sorry about that.  The good news is that the fix is retroactive: any non-English characters that you had previously entered will not appear correctly, without any work on your end.

Attaching content to the board itself, not just to cards

We have added a new feature that should prove handy for a lot of folks: you can now add content — files from your laptop, images from your mobile or tablet, Web links from your Intranet or the Internet, or canvases — to a Task Board or Scrum Board itself.

If this sounds like something that was always there, maybe we need to say that differently: you used to have the ability to add content to a card, now you can add it to the board itself.

There are many situations we have encountered where we want to share content or a canvas with a team, but there wasn’t any obvious place to still it — no single card on the board that seemed like the right place to attach that content.

And that’s because the content we wanted to add was applicable across the entire board, not just relevant to a single card.

This was getting frustrating, so we decided to scratch our itch: a new button on the top-right area of your Kerika app will let you add files, Web links and canvases to the board itself:

Board Attachments
Board Attachments

This should make some of you as happy as it has made us!