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 🙂
A new tutorial video that shows you how the Trash works in Kerika (like a Recycle Bin): you can retrieve any card, canvas or even entire projects or templates that got deleted by mistake!
A new tutorial video, featuring our so-very-soon-to-be-released new user interface, that shows you how you can use Planning Views to manage your due dates, across all your Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
A new tutorial video on how to export cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board, in the HTML format or as an Excel workbook — featuring our very-soon-to-be-released new user interface.
A new tutorial video on how to use Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards — even if you are not strictly following the Kanban model.
Here’s a teaser video of the new Kerika user interface, which we are getting close to releasing…
Among other things, we will consolidate and improve a bunch of project management features under a new “Project Settings” button.
Check it out:
Many of our users work in globally dispersed teams; our own team is spread out between Seattle and India.
With multiple timezones, particularly when they are widely spaced apart, commitments like “I will get this done today” become a little tricky to understand.
If someone in India says “I will get this done today”, is that India time or Seattle time? Well, that depends upon where you are, when you log into Kerika.
Kerika automatically factors in differences in timezones when showing due dates: someone who commits to getting something done “today” in India is actually committing to get it done by 11:30AM Pacific Standard Time, now that the US is in Daylight Savings Mode.
So, the due date is shown in a way that’s relevant to the user’s local time: our Seattle folks see an Indian’s commitment like this
These timezone differences automatically adjust for Daylight Savings Time: there’s nothing you need to do to see when a commitment is actually due.
Except, perhaps, notice that the item is now overdue, as indicated in red in the example above…
We are delighted to introduce Planning Views, a very innovative, very unique way to view your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards! (Yes, it goes way beyond what simple calendar views, like those you might get from other tools, work :-))
Let’s start with your familiar view of a Kerika Task Board or Scrum Board, which we will start calling the Workflow View from now on:
There’s now a simple drop-down that appears on the breadcrumbs, letting you switch to one of the Planning Views:
Your new viewing choices include:
Planning Views provide a date-oriented view of your Task Boards and Scrum Boards: a Planning View takes your cards and rearranges into time-oriented columns.
Here’s an example of a Next 3 days view:
Our Workflow view got neatly (and quickly!) pivoted to arrange all the cards in terms of when they are due:
Here’s the same board, but viewed in terms of the Next 3 weeks:
Switching between these views is super-fast, and these views update in real-time: if a due date for any card is changed by anyone on your project team, no matter where they are located, this change is instantly reflected in your view.
The Next 3-months view is an even higher-level view of the board:
All these views support smart drag-and-drop of cards: if you drag a card across, or up/down a column, the Due Date is automatically changed to reflect the new date. As you move the card, the new date is shown in orange so you know exactly what will happen next:
Since your Planning Views aggregate cards that may be in different columns on your Workflow View, we made it really easy for you to see at a glance where each card is in terms of your workflow:
Navigating forward and backward in time is also easy, as is jumping to “today’s view” if you have navigated too far into the future:
As you navigate forwards or backwards, the “And Beyond” column magically adjusts to show you just what’s out of your current view!
Planning Views work just as well with Task Boards (if you are using Kanban) and Scrum Boards (if you are using Agile).
Check out Planning Views — it’s exactly the kind of great design and innovation that you have come to expect from Kerika…
We are often asked how the Kerika team itself uses Kerika, and we freely share this through demos we have done in person for potential customers and at various events. For those who we haven’t met in person, here’s a blog post instead..
1. Kerika runs on Kerika.
Pretty much everything we do, from the smallest, tangential effort to our main product development is done using the Kerika software.
(It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that, given that we are a distributed team ourselves — spread out between Seattle and India.)
2. No email, limited phone calls
In fact, we gave up using internal email back in Dec 2013. (Email sucks, and Kerika is the smarter alternative to spam.)
Because our team is spread out over 10,000 miles, we do occasional phone calls, using Skype or Google Hangouts, to discuss product strategy, but we don’t have daily phone calls as a matter of routine.
We have a phone call only when there is something substantial to discuss, never to catch up on routine status. In other words, all our phone conferences are about interesting topics, like “What do you think about this idea…?” or “I met a customer today who brought up this problem…”; never about “Where are you with Task X?”.
Kerika keeps us in perfect sync across these 10,000 miles on all matters of routine status and project management, so our phone calls are all strategic in nature.
3. Scrum for Product Development
We work with a 2-week Sprint Cycle for the most part, although we have occasionally deviated from this — never with great results, so sticking to the cycle is usually a good idea!
We capture all of our product ideas and feature requests in one large Scrum Board, which we call, simply, Product Planning.
This board organizes our ideas into various buckets, like Valuable for Enterprises and Valuable for Individuals:
You might notice that the Backlog column is relatively small: only 54 items. That’s because not everything in the other buckets is ready to go into the Backlog, either because a feature isn’t well defined enough, or it isn’t considered important enough to deal with in the short-term.
(We have a lot of ideas that sit and gestate for months, even years!)
It’s also worth noting that the Trash contains 62 items: this means we reject as many ideas as we pursue!
4. A Shared Backlog
As ideas for various features get prioritized — and, more importantly, defined clearly enough to be analyzed in detail by our developers — they get moved to the Backlog.
This backlog is shared by all the individual product development Scrum Boards:
(And, by the way, the screenshot above is from a Kerika Whiteboard that we use to map out our product planning process.)
Each Sprint is organized as a separate Scrum Board, pulling items from the common Backlog.
As items get done (or not, as the case may be), the Backlog slowly shrinks over time.
But, as ideas for new features gets firmed up on the Product Planning board, this keeps feeding more stuff into the Backlog. So, the net result is that our Backlog has remained the same size for years: about 50-60 items.
We have been doing this for a while now, and are currently wrapping up Sprint 55, with each Sprint taking at least 2 weeks, and several taking 1 month to complete.
Here’s an example of one of our Scrum Boards:
5. Kerika’s Smart Notifications
So, if we are a distributed team that doesn’t use email, and not that much phone either, how do we keep up with what’s happening? The answer is: Kerika’s smart notifications help each of us easily keep track of changes taking place across literally hundreds of cards each day.
Here’s an example:
At a glance we can tell that this card has
These smart notifications replace dumb email with a much more efficient mechanism for keeping everyone on the same page.
6. The Development Process
If we open up one of these cards, we can get a glimpse of the Kerika development process. Let’s start with the chat thread on this card:
This chat shows a typical interaction between a junior developer and a technical lead: after writing the code for a particular feature, the developer has passed it on to the tech lead for code review.
The code review itself is attached to the card, as an attachment:
For each feature we develop, our engineers create a small work plan that outlines their design thinking.
This design/work plan is a critical artifact for good software development: it ensures that people can review the work more easily and effectively, and it also provides a reference for the future — if ever a bug is found in this particular feature, we can go back to the work plan to see where the design flaw may have originated.
The code review is typically very short, and attached (in this case) as a Google Doc:
7. Card History
Each card in Kerika keeps track of its own history, which makes it easy for a distributed team to keep track of everything that happened. Frequently, a number of changes may have taken place on a single card during a workday, and someone who is 10,000 miles away is also about 13 hours away in terms of timezones, so the history feature is useful for understanding all the changes that took place when you weren’t looking.
So, that’s a typical card, on a typical board. And, in a typical 2-week Sprint Cycle, our development team handles 175-200 cards!
We love Kerika, not just because we have built it, but because it makes our distributed team so very effective!
One little-known feature of Kerika’s Whiteboards: if you have an image (picture) on a canvas, you can also add a link to a Website, so that anyone clicking on the picture would be taken straight to that website.
(It’s one of several little-known features that we hope will become well-known, with our recent redesign of the Canvas toolbar; we have built too many really cool features that not enough people are aware of!)
One common use of this feature is to create an external-facing page that includes a logo: you can add the logo’s image to your canvas, and then point that logo to your company’s website.
It’s simple: just select the image, and then click on the “Link to website” button on the Canvas toolbar.
