Version 10.0 - What’s New This Month? (March, 2023)

• Initiative/Objective - the name of the specific initiative (objective) 
• Outcomes progress – the current progress status of an outcome or the entire objective. With just a single click on the status indicators, you can dig deeper into the specific outcomes (and their checkpoints) to assess what’s at risk, off track, on track, etc.

• Outcomes projections – indicators of the projected status of an outcome or the entire objective. Keep in mind that when analyzing outcomes, their projection status will be represented in percentages.

• Work progress – an indicator showing the current work progress of an initiative. 
• Target Date – the target end date of an initiative, outcome, or checkpoint. 
• Section – the board section where an initiative is currently in. 
• Note: You can display more fields in your table by adding various card fields (such as board name, workflow, lane, custom fields, etc.) from the dashboard’s settings.

1.2 Assess Work vs. Outcomes Progress & View the Full Work Hierarchy

The Initiatives & Outcomes hub allows you to easily compare outcomes status with actual work progress too. As we mentioned above, the table view displays a work progress indicator for every initiative (objective) that your team is currently working on. This way, you can assess if your daily efforts are actually bringing the results that you’re after.

To facilitate your analysis, you can:

• Slice the data by “work progress”: This displays another pie chart showing you a breakdown of the initiatives with a certain work progress status.

• See the full work hierarchy: To gain even more details, we’re making it possible to see the complete hierarchical structure of a given initiative (objective), including its child, grand-child initiatives, etc. This allows you to dig deeper into insights for both outcomes and work progress on a lower level, so you can improve your decision-making.

• To complement the above, you can also filter what level of hierarchy you wish to see outcomes and work progress data for. The available filtering options are:
  • Full hierarchy 
  • Full hierarchy except top level 
  • Top level only 
  • First level children only

1.3. Aggregate Outcomes & Work Progress Status by Boards, Workspaces, Workflows & More

To help you better understand the status of your goals and work initiatives across different locations in the organization, you can dissect your results into categories by adding one or more fields to your dashboard (ex. “board name”, “workflow name”, etc.).

This allows you to quickly inspect what and how many initiatives or outcomes with a certain status you have across boards, workflows, lanes, etc., in a bar chart view.

1.4. Inspect Workflow & Initiative Outcomes Directly Inside Your Boards

To facilitate your analysis even more, we’ve drilled down the “Initiatives & Outcomes” dashboard into “mini hubs” on a workflow and initiative level which contain information about individual work items too.

1. We’ve added a “Workflow status” option in the board settings (accessible from the three dots in the top right corner) of every Initiative or Timeline workflow. There, you get insights into the status of your initiatives and outcomes only for the specific workflow.

2. We’re releasing a “Show initiatives status” option inside the context menu of every initiative where you can inspect the status only for the specific initiative.

Believe it or not, this overview just scratches the surface of all the details of the “Initiatives & Outcomes” dashboard. More detailed information on it can be found in the dedicated article. This functionality opens up a whole new management universe of possibilities, so make sure you explore it further.

2. Experience A New Level of Flow Governance with Arrival/Departure Rules & Card Ordering

In our first product release for 2023, we announced Beta versions of two major functionalities:

1. Arrival & Departure Rules
2. Card Ordering

As part of Kanbanize 10, we’re officially releasing both features.

2.1. Control Arrival/Departure of Work Across Processes

The Arrival & Departure Rules are a new concept in the product which allows you to set policies/conditions for the entry or exit of work in/from specific areas of your process. With their help, you can achieve unmatched flow governance across the entire value stream and ensure that teams work only on the most important initiatives.

Creating Arrival & Departure rules is rather easy. All you have to do is enter your “Board Policies” where you can set an arrival and/or departure rule per:

• Board 
• Workflow 
• Column 
• Lane 
• Cell

Based on your chosen location, adding your first rule happens by clicking on the “pencil-like” icon. From there, the system will prompt you to choose the conditions by which you wish the arrival/departure rule to abide.

From selecting what properties/criteria (ex. type, priority, specific deadline, etc.) cards entering/exiting a process area should meet to determining where work must be entering/exiting from, the possibilities are endless. And while going into details is out of the scope of this article, here are some ground rules to keep in mind:

• The rules work across the hierarchy. i.e. a movement of a card on the team level could be forbidden if that would result in moving an initiative on the portfolio level, where the departure rules have not been met. 
• Your arrival/departure rules will be visible inside the card's details.

• A visual indication will appear once you set an arrival/departure rule in a specific board area.

• You can have up to 5 active arrival/departure rules in a given area.
• When setting up multiple conditions for an arrival/departure rule, all of them need to apply for the policy to be met.
• When you have two (or more) overlapping arrival/departure rules in a given board area, all of them need to be met.

Learn more about the Arrival & Departure Rules in our dedicated article.

2.2. Gain Greater Work Prioritization Flexibility at Scale

To help you unlock more flexibility into your work prioritization efforts, we’re officially introducing the ability to set permanent card orders based on different criteria. You can do this on a column, sub-column, or cell by:

• Setting a permanent card order from the Workflow editor.

• Right-clicking on a board column and choosing “Order cards”. Remember that we’ve revamped the previous card sorting in the software, and through this option, you can order cards “temporarily”, “for everyone”, and “permanently”. 

It is important to mention that the permanent order can be used in conjunction with the Arrival/Departure rules across the entire work hierarchy. For example, you can permanently order your initiatives by priority and use a departure rule to restrict work to be started only on one of the first three items inside a “Committed Initiatives” column.

Learn more about Card ordering here.

3. Unlock a Deeper Analysis of Your Workflows Performance

To further enhance your work with the “Workflow Performance Summary” widget, besides monitoring whether your flow performance is improving or not compared to a given previous period, you can now see which work items constitute the data.

In other words, by simply clicking on one of the flow indicators (lead time, cycle time, block time, throughput, flow efficiency, WIP), the system will give you an excerpt of the cards that form a given flow result for the selected period. The same is true for the table below the main indicators, where you can analyze the lead times that specific cards accumulated when moving through certain columns.

Other than that, as for the lead time, cycle time, and block time metrics, you can analyze 95%, 85%, or 50% of the data, this is reflected accordingly when digging into the specific work items.

4. Other Improvements

As always, in Kanbanize 10, we’re introducing several smaller but valuable improvements to the system. Let’s check them out below.

• Specify who can check out exit criteria

To give you more control over marking your exit criteria on cards, you can now add users who are allowed to check out a given exit criterion. The option is available when editing a specific exit criterion, and you can choose among available users on the board.

Once that’s applied, hovering over an exit criterion inside a card will show you who can check it out.

• New built-in rule for Initiative workflows

For better work management convenience, we’re also releasing a new built-in rule: “Move Initiatives from Backlog to Requested when their first child card is moved to the Requested area” which you can enable/disable.

• Board notifications improvement

Moreover, we’ve enhanced the board notifications with the additional option to only receive notifications for cards where you’re:

- Owner

- Co-owner 

- Contributor 

- Reporter

• Manage Security Settings & Access Audit Logs Are Now Separate Admin Privileges

Moving forward, for an even wider delegation of admin responsibilities, “Manage Security Settings” and “Access Audit Logs” are now 2 separate admin privileges.

• “Hide empty policies” option in Board Policies

To improve the visualization of your Board policies, you can now filter to see only those fields with present policies and collapse the empty ones.

• “Type” property is available in email notifications

Last but not least, from now on, the “type” property on cards will be available when receiving email notifications.