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Using Kanban in the Classroom
In: Uncategorized
23 Jan 2012Guest post: Patty Beidleman, Elementary Educator
Many of you may know our next guest blogger, Patty Beidleman, from Twitter where she she’s well known in Lean / Kanban community as @topsurf. She’s been a friend and inspiration for us at LeanKit since the early, early days of the company. We’ve been impressed by her passion for improving education through technology and for innovation with Personal Kanban – using both physical and electronic Kanban. She is actively working to export ideas from the IT Lean / Agile world into the education community. And we’ve been proud to help her.
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I have been using Personal Kanban successfully for more than two years now. I love the simplicity, and the way it flows and changes with you. What I love most about Personal Kanban is that anyone in any situation can use it to be more productive, effective and efficient in his or her work, whether you are a stay-at-home mom or the CEO of a company. Here are just a few of the ways I have used Personal Kanban:
Service Downtime Complete
In: Uncategorized
21 Jan 2012As of 6:10 PM US Central Standard Time (GMT -6) LeanKit has completed our migration of the Kanban system to our new hosting environment in Reston, VA. All manual and automated testing and monitoring indicate that full service has been restored. We already see normal usage by a number of business and personal kanban customers. We see no indication of issues from our global monitoring sites, but it does sometimes take longer for Internet routing changes (DNS) to reach some corners of the globe. We are confident that this will be totally complete by Sunday, and certainly by normal business hours Monday.
Our new hosting environment will allow us to better support our rapidly growing customer base, and help us better prevent and respond to service outages like we experienced Tuesday. We know that continuous up-time for SaaS systems like LeanKit is critical for our customers to depend on them.
If you see any issues or performance degradation, please don’t hesitate to e-mail us at support@leankitkanban.com or visit http://support.leankitkanban.com for information or to log a support ticket.
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The LeanKit Team
Outage Report and Planned Downtime
In: Uncategorized
17 Jan 2012for Saturday, January 21
Today, January 17, from 2:27PM to 2:53PM CST (GMT-6), the LeanKitKanban application was unavailable for a total of 26 minutes. Our production database server became unresponsive and had to be physically rebooted by the network engineers at our hosting provider, PEER1 Networks in Los Angeles. The support staff at PEER1 has indicated that they suspect an underlying hardware failure may be the cause, but little information is available to troubleshoot further.
Over the past few months, we’ve built out and tested a new production environment for LeanKitKanban at a PEER1 data center in Herndon, VA. This new environment includes additional capacity, load balancing and fault tolerance features. This was done as part of normal capacity planning as the number of customers using LeanKitKanban is rapidly growing.
Since we have a somewhat mysterious “hardware problem” at our existing production site, we have decided to expedite the move to our new production datacenter in Herndon, VA. Though we normally like to give at least 7 days notice of any downtime, we will make an exception in this case, and schedule downtime for this Saturday, January 21.
The downtime window will be from 3PM to 7PM CST (GMT-6) this Saturday, January 21.
We apologize for the interruption today, and thank you for your patience.
Chris Hefley
CEO, LeanKit
Using Kanban to improve audit management
In: Kanban Method
10 Jan 2012Guest post: Yuval Yeret of Agile Sparks
One of our New Year’s resolutions at LeanKit is to do a better job of sharing ideas for effectively using Kanban with our customers. We pick up some pretty good ideas from working with customers, and we promise that we’ll be working some of those into blog posts from time to time. We are also blessed with a lot of really smart friends in the Lean/Agile community, a number of whom have agreed to share their wisdom with us and you as guest bloggers.
The first of these guest posts is from Yuval Yeret of Agile Sparks. We’ve known Yuval for several years now and both respect and really like him. He’s a talented Kanban trainer and consultant and a frequent speaker on the Lean/Agile conference circuit. You should definitely check-out his blog yuvalyeret.com and his presentations on Slideshare.
Enjoy!
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Background
Every time we at AgileSparks get a chance to go out of our comfort zone of technology delivery organizations, it excites us. We believe that the thinking, principles and practices we use for technology delivery are very relevant in other knowledge-intensive domains as well, and keep looking for opportunities to test that belief. Our work with technology delivery organizations exposes us to other supporting activities in organizations. I recently wrote on my blog about an HR group that we worked with (and I have more updates about that group that I need to write about…). This time I want to talk about another type of activity – Audit.
An Audit group within an organization is charged with auditing systems and processes mainly as part of Risk Management. Let’s look at what Agile/Kanban might mean in this context.
Do we need training to “do” Kanban?
In: Kanban Method
3 Jan 2012The benefits of professional Lean coaching
When we tell people about our company, we’re often asked whether customers need training to use LeanKit or to “do” Kanban. The short answer is no. Kanban as a tool is about as simple as it gets: sticky notes, whiteboard, markers, go. And we’ve tried to build LeanKit to be as simple to use as physical Kanban – in some ways a lot easier when it comes to evolving and templating board design, capturing metrics, and generating graphics. We’re constantly thinking about how to improve the experience. In fact, we are working hard right now on an overhaul of our UI to make the user experience even better.
The Kanban method is also simple at first glance. Authors like David Anderson, Jim Benson, and Alan Shalloway, and others have written quite good books to explain it. Check-out the Reading section of our page navigation for a list of resources. You definitely should read these books. And, having read them, you absolutely can “do” Kanban on your own. Many of our customers have done so with great success.
But, like anything there’s the basics and then there’s expertise. We advise people to start by quickly making a simple model of their team’s current workflow – not to try to reengineer their process or map out every permutation. Just get started because the benefits of having any kind of board are so large that you want to get them right away. You can certainly do this on your own. But this initial board design is a starting point.
Happy New Year!
Consider them a belated Christmas present or just a great way to start 2012, but either way, we’ve deployed a few new features for LeanKit.
First and foremost, Professional Edition users can now add comments to their cards by replying to system-generated notification e-mails. So, if someone assigns you a card, adds a comment in the app, updates a card on a board or in a lane to which you are subscribed, etc., and you get the notification e-mail, you can just reply right to it and have your comments added to the card’s comment thread. We think this will make the comments feature much more interactive and useful!
We’ve added a couple of minor enhancements to board editing. If you’ve made changes to a board’s design and accidentally click the discard changes instead of the save button, the system will prompt you whether you are sure. A small thing, but we know if will save people some heartburn! And we’ve added the ability to add a comment when you change the board structure. This will be added later into some of our analytics graphs so you can better associate big data changes with the business/process changes that caused them.
And, finally, we retired User Voice and shifted all of our customer support to ZenDesk. Some of our users (and frankly some of us) were getting confused by suggestions being stored in User Voice and issues in ZenDesk. Don’t worry that the great idea you submitted was lost; all existing suggestions were migrated to ZenDesk. We couldn’t, unfortunately, migrate the number of votes that each idea had earned in User Voice. But, we are working hard on the items that were at the top of the list: task lists, boards-within-boards, UI refresh, even better analytics, etc. We expect a big batch of them to be deployed very soon. Consider these a down payment. And, you can, if you like vote on your favorites again in ZenDesk. All the in-app links have been pointed to the new site.
http://support.leankitkanban.com
Kindest regards as you start the New Year. Thanks so much for honoring us with your business.
The LeanKit Team
LeanKit Kanban API & Wrappers
In: Uncategorized
21 Dec 2011As we mentioned in an earlier post, our customers have integrated LeanKit with many different kinds of systems. And we provide services to develop integrations if you don’t have the time or inclination to do this yourself. But, if you do want to develop your own integration, here’s the section in our knowledge base about our API.
http://support.leankitkanban.com/forums/20153741-api
Our customers have initiated the following publicly-available wrappers. If you know of another one please let us know so we can share the information! And if you want to start another wrapper and share it with the world, we’ll make sure to publicize your work. There’s a large (40,000+ users and growing very quickly) audience for LeanKit so it should get you some attention.
And, if you develop a general purpose integration to another popular SaaS product and are willing to share that integration code with your fellow LeanKit customers, we may be able to offset your development cost by trading you for a credit toward your LeanKit subscription. Contact us for details.
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