1. Deprecation of Links’ Synchronization and New Business Rules to Replace Them
Kanbanize 8.6 brings several major updates to the platform. One of them is the deprecation of the synchronization between cards. From now on, you will be able to copy properties between linked cards via their correlated business rules instead.
IMPORTANT: Current users of the software can still access the standard copy/sync functionality, but it will be retired at the beginning of Q4 2021. If you need help migrating your synchronization strategy to the business rules approach, please contact your solution partner or our support team.
Moving forward, if you need to keep certain card properties in sync, you will have to configure business rules of type “updated” for card links (ex. “parent card is updated”). If you do so, you will see a brand new “copy” action besides “move” and “update”. One example is to copy certain properties from a parent card into its child.
This gives you more flexibility to transfer given card properties only if the “linked” card matches specific criteria. Moreover, you can now automatically sync fields between numerous cards without having to manually do that.
For more information, refer to the dedicated article.
1.1 New Business Rules
To enable the update from above, all links inside the system have their correlating business rules of type “updated” and “moved”.
Besides the ones currently present in the software, the new rules are:
- “Child card is updated”
- “Relative card is updated”
- “Predecessor card is updated”
- “Predecessor card is moved”
- “Successor card is updated”
- “Successor card is moved”
Visit our Business Rules section to learn how to operate them in their respective articles.
2. New Board Interface
Our latest version also introduces a new board interface. From now on, you will see the following design:
Apart from a few displacements in some of the icons on the board, you will notice a slight change when setting up backgrounds. First, the board colors will appear when you click on the plain background panel as seen below. Second, there is a new “Remove background” button at the bottom which removes any images or colors that have been applied.
3. Blocker Dynamics Chart
Kanbanize 8.6 welcomes the newest addition to our Analytics module: the “Blocker Dynamics” chart! With its help, you can track and analyze how often certain blockers occur and get resolved in your process.
The chart is accessible from the “Blockers” tab in the Analytics module and visualizes the block count on the y-axis and a timeline on the x-axis. It consists of vertical bars, colored by the different types of blockers in your process. Those bars are labeled with “N” (new) and “R” (resolved) acronyms, showing you respectively how many blockers of a certain type occurred and when as well as how many were resolved on a given date.
What’s extremely handy here is the trend line indicating how many active blockers of a certain type you had at the end of a predefined time unit (day, week, month, etc.). Furthermore, with the help of the summary statistics, you can analyze the historical rate of new or active blockers in your process including how often and quickly you are able to resolve them for a given period of time.
For more in-depth information about the “Blocker Dynamics” chart, check out our dedicated article.
4. Show Entire Links Hierarchy
This month we also give you new functionality, related to seeing a refined “tree” hierarchical structure of a given card. It is accessible from the “Links Overview” area and clicking it opens up a new window where you get a more detailed view of the child links structure of the selected card.
There, the system allows you to configure what properties you see for the cards and rearrange them as necessary. Except for the “Title” property, you can choose to remove or add new card fields. This helps you conduct a quick in-depth analysis of the child cards under a given parent.
It’s important to mention that apart from the “Links overview” area, you can also access the new functionality from the context menu of a card. This comes in handy when you want to get a quick overview of the links hierarchy of multiple cards. All you have to do is select them all and click on “Show links hierarchy” as seen below.
5. New Properties in Analytics
From now on in Kanbanize, you will be able to filter data by two new properties in the Analytics module: “Parent cards” and “Title”. With the former, you can extract data for cards whose parent matches/doesn’t match certain criteria (ex. priority, type, etc.). The latter helps you filter cards that have a specific title.
A common use case is when you want to analyze only the connected work items (child cards) of a particular project (parent card). The two properties allow you to cover such cases by filtering data only for cards that have a specific parent or title.
6. Other Improvements
- Reorder Cards in Business Rules
Kanbanize 8.6 comes with a bunch of other smaller but useful improvements. First of all, you can now rearrange the order of creating cards in the business rules that allow you to do that. Let’s take the “Card is Created” rule for example.
Suppose that you set up 3 successors to be created whenever you add a new card of a given type to your process. Inside the business rule, you can change the order in which those successor cards appear in the workflow. This way, you won’t have to manually rearrange them on your board once the rule is triggered.
- “Select/Deselect All” Options in Analytics
Other than that, we give you the flexibility to automatically select/deselect all work stages in the Analytics module. All you have to do is hop over to “Workflow stages” under the controls of a given chart, where you will see two buttons representing both options.
- Optimization of “Link to Existing Card” Popup
In our latest version, you will notice a slight change in the look of the “Link to Existing Card” popup. The window that appears and the “Destination card” dropdown are now wider in size. Furthermore, you can view which workspace a given card is located in once you hover over it. This will allow you to see more of the title of a given card.
- Time Units in CFD
Another improvement this month is the addition of the Time Units configuration to the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). With this release, you will be able to specify per what time periods to see data on the CFD chart: day/week/month, etc. This is also available in the CFD widget so you can visualize your data directly on a dashboard.
- Show the “Normal” Priority on Initiatives
Last but not least, before the system was only displaying the priority on initiatives if it were “critical”, “high” or “low”. From now on, you can see the priority on initiatives even if it’s “normal”.
Happy Kanbanizing with version 8.6!