Tag Archives: Teams

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

UI tweak: removing the “Add member” button from card details

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

As part of our work on combining tags and colors, we have been cleaning up parts of the Kerika user interface that had minor inconsistencies.

One such inconsistency — in our view — was that you were able to add people to a project team from within the card details dialog itself:

Adding people to a team
Adding people to a team

This button has been there in Kerika for a very long time, but it doesn’t really make sense to have this capability within the card details dialog: it just isn’t the best place to decide to add someone to a project team.

Instead, in our new layout the Project Settings dialog consolidates all the board management in one place, including adding people to a team, changing someone’s role within a team, and removing someone from a team:

 

Easier to tell who moved a card to your board’s Trash

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

When a Team Member deletes a card, it just gets moved to the board’s Trash; it doesn’t get immediately deleted from Kerika’s database even though it disappears from your view right away.

That’s because the “delete” action in Kerika is really a “move to Trash” action: you are removing something from view, but not necessarily getting rid of it for good.

Any Team Member can delete a card, but only a Project Leader can completely and permanently get rid of it — in other words, “taking out the trash” is one of the privileges reserved for Project Leaders (and Account Owners).

The Trash column is normally not shown on your Task Board or Scrum Board, but you can bring it view easily by clicking on the Filter button:

Making Trash visible
Making Trash visible

 

With our latest version, it’s easy to see who moved the card to the Trash: we show this right on the card itself.

Seeing who deleted a card
Seeing who deleted a card

“In Progress”: a new Kerika feature

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

We are adding “In Progress” as a new status tag for cards, on Task Boards and Scrum Boards, that we think will make it easier for everyone to see which items are actually moving along.

In Progress
In Progress

Couple of reasons why we did this:

  • People get assigned too many cards sometimes, even when they are working with a “Pull” model (as opposed to “Push”), sometimes even using Work-in-Progress (WIP) Limits don’t solve the problem of easily seeing exactly what’s being worked on at any time.
Template example
Template example

In this process template, we have three buckets of activities: Background Check, IT & Facilities Setup, and Onboarding, and we have a separate In Progress column that you could use to indicate which card is currently in progress.

But, with a “In Progress” status indicator on cards, you wouldn’t need that extra column: you could work on cards from any of those three buckets and indicate their status right there. And when the work gets completed, these cards can go straight to Done!

Filtering by People: a new feature

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

When you are working with a large board and a large team, it’s often useful to see just those cards that are assigned to some people.

For example, you might want to just see those cards that are assigned to you, so that you can focus on getting your stuff done and not get distracted by everything else that’s going on.

With our newest release of Kerika, we have made this both possible and easy.

One quick menu choice, within our new Filter dialog, will make it possible for you to filter your view of a Task Board or Scrum Board to just see the items assigned to you:

Just my items
Just my items

If you are a Project Leader, you might want to filter your view of a board even further, and Kerika makes that easy:

Filter by People
Filter by People

 

This view is particularly handy if you are trying to deal with staffing issues: for example, if one person has called in sick, you can first filter your view to show just the items assigned to that person, and then add more cards to your view to see how busy someone else on the team is, if you are thinking of offloading the sick person’s work to someone else.

Filtering by Status: a new feature

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , ,

Here’s another way that Kerika makes it easy to manage really large Task Boards and Scrum Boards: you can use the new Filter dialog to show just those cards that are flagged as having a particular status — for example, you could view just the Critical items, or just the Needs Rework items:

Kerika has several  flags you can use to identify the state of the cards on your board:

Card status
Card status
  • Ready to Pull: this means the card is ready to be picked by someone within the team, in accordance with the project’s workflow.
  • In Progress: this signals the card is being actively worked on by someone; it helps call out which cards are active, among several that may be assigned to the same person.
  • Needs Rework: this calls out the need for a “do-over” of some part of the work — e.g. if a design fails review, or work was not done as expected on a particular card.
  • On Hold: this indicates that the person assigned to that card has put it aside temporarily, usually because the person got diverted by some other work (which presumably is now marked as “In Progress”).
  • Is Blocked: not good; it means that the person who has been assigned that work is not able to progress as they would like to, due to forces beyond their control. Time for the Project Leaders to intervene!
  • Critical: hopefully this gets used sparingly…

Use Kerika’s new Filter by Status capability for your project status review meetings: it’s easy to see which cards are going well, and which ones need help.

Using Filters with your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

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

A new tutorial video that shows you how Kerika’s powerful Filter feature lets you customize your view of any Task Board or Scrum Board: just see those cards that are assigned to you, or create more custom views of a board by selecting cards based upon their status, tags, or the people assigned to work on them.

You can even hide entire columns on the board if you like 🙂