We have a new (five-minute) video that gives a fast overview of Kerika’s many capabilities:
Let us know what you think!
Tag Archives: Templates
An improvement to Views: eliminating Templates
As one of our users pointed out, Kerika’s Views — What’s Assigned to Me, What Got Done, etc. — shouldn’t include any cards from templates, just regular boards.
People who use templates on a regular basis often pre-assign cards in the template: for example, an employee on-boarding template that involves HR tasks may be preassigned to a specific HR employee.
Our initial implementation of Views included cards from Templates as well, which led to a misleading impression of the amount of work, particularly unscheduled work, that was waiting for a particular person.
That’s fixed now: Views will automatically exclude cards from Templates.
Customer Journey Maps: a new template
We have a new process template that you can use to create Customer Journey Maps, based upon some great articles written by the Nielsen Norman Group.
This template contains all the step you need to create your own Customer Journey Map, along with links to articles on the subject from the Nielsen Norman Group.
It’s part of our “Creative Stuff” category of process templates, which includes the Google Design Sprints as well.
Kerika’s Templates
We offer a small selection of templates, covering a wide range of possible projects, to help our users get started with new boards — and, more importantly, to help introduce the concept of templates to folks.
Some of the templates we have on offer:
- Onboarding New Employees: a template for handling hiring and starting a new employee. (Surprisingly popular!)
- Solution Sales: a template for professional services companies to track their sales opportunities; essentially a CRM for small professional services companies.
- Setting up a business in Washington State: contributed by one of our users.
- Bug tracking: for software teams.
- Implementing an EHR: an example of a complex template, based upon the US Government’s guidelines for implementing an Electronic Health Records system at hospitals.
- Business Model Canvas: for startups.
We experienced some performance issues related to these templates recently which we have fixed: as the total number of Kerika users grew, the number of people wanting to use the same templates grew somewhat faster than we had anticipated, so we needed to make some back-end fixes to make sure there wasn’t a slowdown in performance.
Can you see it now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows
Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, gave a presentation on Visual Workflows at the Lean Transformation 2015 Conference in Tacoma, Washington, which was very well received.
Here are the slides from that talk:
“In Progress”: a new Kerika feature
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.
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.
- It allows for greater flexibility in designing process templates: like in this example, for a process for hiring and onboarding new employees:
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!
Bug, fixed: a scenario where you could have ended up with duplicate tags
We found a scenario where your Scrum Board could end up with duplicate tags. Let’s say you had a Shared Backlog which had some tags, and you also had a Scrum Board Template that had some similar tags.
If you created a new Scrum Board using that Backlog and that Template, you could have ended up with some duplicate tags, which is not at all helpful.
We have fixed this.
Switching between open projects
When you have expanded your view of a Kerika board to fill up the browser, using the “Max View” button on the top-right corner of the Kerika app
Another button appears on the top-right, to help you quickly switch between all your open project tabs, as well as get to your Home Page:
This button is color coded to help you understand, at a glance, what’s going on in all your open projects:
- If any of your open projects has an overdue card, then the button appears in red.
- If any of your open projects has updates that you haven’t seen yet, the button appears in orange.
- If any of your open projects has new cards that you haven’t seen yet, the button appears in blue.
Clicking on the button shows a list of all your open projects, along with your Home Page:
The little green arrow (shown above at the top) points to the currently open tab, the one that you are viewing right now.
Projects have a blue icon; templates have a purple icon: in the example above, Statewide Tennis Shoe Distribution is a template, while all the others are projects.
- Boards with unread updates have orange titles, like Health Services above.
- Boards with overdue cards have red titles, like Release Note Proof of Concept above.
- Boards with new (unseen) cards have blue titles, like Statewide Tennis Shoe Distribution above.
You can reorganize your list of open tabs by simply dragging them up or down this list.
(But, the Home Page is always on the top; that can’t be moved.)
You can also close an open project tab that you are no longer interested in by clicking on the “X” to the right edge of the entry.
So, there’s a simple visual consistency in Kerika’s design:
- Blue = New
- Orange = Changed
- Red = Overdue
Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes
At the Jan 12, 2015 meeting of the Washington State Lean Practitioners Community of Practice meeting, organized by Results Washington at the Department of Labor & Industries in Tumwater, Arun Kumar presented Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes.
Here’s the presentation on Slideshare (although most of it was actually a demo!):
The meeting was attended by dozens of Lean experts representing a huge variety of state agencies in Washington!
A small, but hopefully useful, change in how Templates are sorted
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.