1. How to forecast the duration of your Initiatives?
This Forecast feature is in official beta.
It is used to forecast the duration of your Initiatives. This new capability marks a huge step forward in the area of data-driven management – something that the Kanban world adheres to.
While still in development, the Forecast feature in Kanbanize is a unique addition to complete process management with accurate predictions in mind. Based on your historical data and past trends analysis, this functionality allows you to get reliable forecasts for your projects.
The feature works per Initiative. To see it in action, open a Team initiative, and go to the “Forecast” tab.
In order to obtain a forecast, you need to have at least one child card linked to the initiative. When the simulation starts, it will take all child cards of the initiative, it will find similar cards that were finished in the past and will run thousands of samples, trying to project the duration of the whole initiative. The result is visualized on a horizontal bar chart.
The graph provides four estimations: Optimistic, Realistic, Pessimistic, and Very Pessimistic, all measured in days.
The forecast feature is currently available only for team initiatives (initiatives in Team boards).
The assumption under which it operates is that only one level of child cards is present below the initiative.
The algorithm will not traverse more than one level of the card hierarchy.
Once the accuracy of the algorithm has been proven, the forecast feature will be scaled across multiple hierarchical levels, including both Team and Management boards.
To learn how does forecasting work, please check the dedicated article here.
2. Create and manage Teams in the User Management panel
With the new "Teams" feature in the Administration panel, Account Owners can create and manage Teams. This product enhancement aims to facilitate bulk user access to selected boards and allows you to set different roles for a team to each board.
The teams reflect the internal organizational structure and might be created to serve a temporary service. To create a new team, open the "Teams" tab in the Administration and click "Create a team" (1).
Img.1
The next step is to add team members to the new team.
The Teams table lists all currently created teams, the number of team members per each team, plus the number of boards the respective team is assigned to.
Click any value under the Teams members column (2) to open the panel with all registered Kanbanize users with the selected team.
Filter out or scroll down to find the selected user name and click the respective switch button to make them members.
The user might become:
Team member: can access all boards where the team is assigned to.
Team manager: can add/remove users as well as edit the team.
When you complete adding team members, select the Boards to which the team is assigned to. All members will get access to those boards.
Click the link in the "Board membership" column (Img.1 (3)) and then use the corresponding switch button of each board you wish to add to the team. You can also define the board-level Role of the Team: click the respective role in the "Role" column of each added board to open a panel with all existing roles. The role controls the permitted actions of the team members on that particular board. Teams can be assigned to multiple boards and they can have different roles for each of them.
Notes:
Role inheritance:
* The members of the team inherit the team's role for all boards that the team is assigned to.
** When users belong to several teams and these teams have different roles to a board, users get the most permissive role.
*** If a user is added to a board individually and as a member of a team (which is added to the same board), they obtain the most permissive role.
Role exceptions in board roles: The Workspace Manager role or the Owner privilege role override board-level roles.
To learn more about Teams management, please check the dedicated article.
3. Copy parents when creating a new linked card
The Copy/Sync settings come in action when you create a new linked card. The newly added options allow you to copy the parents of an existing card as well as its synced properties.
This enhancement is particularly useful in the following scenario:
Very often the card you are working on is linked to more than one initiative. This usually makes the task more complex and requires the attention of multiple teams (next step on a task has to be executed by a different team), that work on different board/workflow.
Moving the card to another working environment disrupts the metrics and the integrity of the current flow. So far, there wasn't out of the box solution for easier implementation of such a scenario. Users either had to create a new child or a card relative to the original one and then manually link it to the Initiatives for clear visualization.
The new additions to the Copy/Sync settings save your time and allow for easier and automated setup. When you create a new linked card, you can choose to copy the parents of the original one as well as its synced properties.
As a result, the new card will be automatically linked to the Initiatives and will inherit the sync properties of the original (parent or relative) card i.e. color, deadline, etc.
TIP: This improvement is very useful in the context of business rules that trigger new card creation.
The new options become available in the configuration panels of the rules.
4. Other Product enhancements
- Improved API v.2
With Product Update 7.4, you have the ability to manage logged time, using the Kanbanize API v.2. The following API endpoints are now available:
- add “log time”
- edit “ log time”
- delete “log time”
- get “log time”
- get the history of “log time” events