If you are working in multiple projects, then you know how complicated it is to track and clear blocking issues from multiple projects. It’s all to easy to get caught up in the details that you forget about some of the blockers. Two weeks later you remember that the blocker you were supposed to resolve is still there, clogging up the flow.

We have a solution for you.

The Alerts Widget

The alerts widget on the home page shows you all the outstanding blockers from across all the projects you are involved in. With this widget, you

• Get a bird’s eye view of the blockers across all projects
• Keep up to date on potential risks for the project
• Ensure you don’t drop the ball in eliminating impediments

If you look through the features in your project, you’ll find some that fit the “Fixed Date” class of service. These are work items that need to be completed by a given date. Some examples are

• A feature needs to be added in time to meet a regulatory deadline
• A feature needs to be shown at an upcoming conference

In these cases, there is a big cost if the feature is not ready by the given date.

Another instance where this is used is in Service Level Agreements. Teams that work under SLAs have to complete features within the timeframe prescribed in the SLA, and there could be penalties if the timeframe is not met. This scenario is particularly common with teams that use Kanban on managing maintenance and support projects.

In this screencast, I show how easy it is to manage SLAs and Fixed Date work items in Silver Catalyst. Take a look below

A lot of emphasis in software development process is placed on project management – making a commitment, planning, and tracking everything so you ensure you don’t drift away from the plan. Funnily enough, many agile projects have also ended up with this ‘form’ of project management.

And don’t get me wrong, it is important not to screw up!

But, in the worry not to screw up, are we losing sight of the opportunity to get better? Do we understand what we are building? Do we know where our bottlenecks are? Are we best aligned to business needs?

So here we go – the showdown between Project Management and Project Intelligence:

We’ve just released a significant update to Silver Stories which vastly improves the integration flow between Stories and Catalyst. Many thanks to all the early users who provided feedback for this.

Here is what the update does:

• Every project created in Silver Catalyst has an Icebox page. You can use this page to store all features that are in the pipeline, but still not committed to. Once in a while you’ll go through the Icebox and move some of the upcoming stories into the backlog
• You no longer have the concept of Teams. You can now directly allocate stories from the story map to the project
• Stories that are allocated on the User Story Map are transferred to the Icebox of the project. From here they team can move it to the appropriate position on the backlog and work on it as usual

I know this is a bit abstract, so if you are using Silver Stories, then send an email to support@toolsforagile.com and we’ll do a personalised half hour demo to show you the simplified integration flow in action.

A big problem in effectively managing multi-initiative programs and portfolios is the ability to quickly grasp the big picture across all the initiatives and teams involved. The new Workspace Dashboard allows you to do just that. The screenshot below shows a typical dashboard.

The dashboard above tracks two teams, four standalone projects and seven initiatives. The structure is like this:

• The seven initiatives are divided between the two teams. One team works on five initiatives while the other works on three. (One initiative is worked on by both the teams).
• The two teams use a Kanban flow. One of the standalone projects uses Scrum, the other three use Kanban.
• In addition there are four standalone projects that are not tied to any team or initiative.

The dashboard shows (as numbered in the picture):

1. The cumulative flow graph for the two teams and the four standalone projects (Scrum teams will have a sprint burndown instead)
2. The initiative status overlaid on the user story map: Red means that part of the initiative is not started yet, pink is queued to start, orange is in progress, green is done
3. Pipeline status for each team: How many stories are queued up for the team, how many are in backlog, how many are done

With this information, a stakeholder, product owner or program manager can:

1. Track a staggering amount of information across the portfolio. In this example: two teams, four standalone projects and seven initiatives
2. See the status of initiatives across multiple teams that may be working on it
3. See the status of teams across multiple initiatives that they may be involved in

One of the really nice things with physical cards is that you can easily annotate it with stickies and other things such that the story card conveys a huge amount of information right at a glance.

For instance, lets say that one feature requires having a conversation with Bill. This is not a formal task that you want to track, but its just a kind of ad-hoc reminder on something that needs to be done.

Doing this with physical cards is easy! Just take a small sticky, write “Talk to Bill” on it and slap it on the story card. Done!

You’ll never forget with the sticky right there on the card. When you’re done, take out the sticky, tear it up and throw it away.

This simple operation can become extremely complicated with an electronic tool.

That’s the kind of problem we always grapple with.

How can we make the board as simple, visible and flexible as a physical board, but retain all the functionality that electronic tools excel at?

Creating Ad-hoc notes in Silver Catalyst

So here is how you can create ad-hoc notes in Silver Catalyst and get them to display on the card in the board.

It’s very simple really.

Just go to the project settings and add a new custom field as shown below. Lets call this field ‘notes’. Set the type to text.

And…you’re done!

Now if you fill up this notes field, it will appear on the card on the board. Just like the image below.

Wasn’t that simple?

One of the things that is fantastic about physical post it notes is the way you can easily make various bits of information visible. You can jot down any relevant information, like created and started date, cycle time, any reference id. You can use stickies to identify who is working on the feature, and further stickies to indicate blocks and other bits of information. By doing this you can easily visualize what is going on.

This is an area where electronic tools often fall short. Many tools don’t use a card visualization at all, and of those that do, most just display a card with the description on it.

Being big believers in visual management, we just couldn’t leave it at that. That’s why we’ve gone ahead and implemented a brand new feature – card  annotations.

Feature properties are now annotated on the card so that whether you are looking at the backlog, or the board, you see all the information that you need to.

Examples

Here are some examples of annotations in Silver Catalyst.

The above (click to view full size) is an example of annotations when viewing features in the backlog. Each row is colored according to the feature type. Red is a bug, green is an enhancement and so on. Additionally, cards are annotated with priority (Must), and Class of Service (Expedite, Fixed Date). In case a feature has a fixed date for delivery (for example to meet a conference/demo date) then the time until it is due is annotated. If there is an estimate then this is annotated on the card as well. These annotations are there to help you to make smart choices when looking at and ordering the backlog.

In addition to the ID and class of service, the feature card also shows properties related to external integrations. In this case, it shows links to change sets in source control that are linked to this feature (#55 ,#60, #61). We also see external test results from another tool annotated on the card (10 tests, 6 passing).

If you have linked Silver Catalyst with Silver Stories then you will see some Stories annotations like which initiative this story originated from (Silver Catalyst).

Task cards are annotated with the task estimate (if any) and the person working on it. The person is color coded – each user is assigned one color so you can quickly glance around the board and figure out what everyone is working on.

There is a lot of scope for using annotations – for example, you might want to create custom properties and have it show up as an annotation on the card. With card annotating, all the information you need on the backlog and on the board is made visible – another example of our commitment to helping you use visual management principles to improve your delivery process.

We’ve just deployed a new feature in Silver Catalyst. The feature view and task view pages have been reorganized. In addition, you can now add additional feature details on the feature view page. We’ve added tabs to separate the feature contents from the event history and have moved the history to its own tab.

The page also sports the new property bar in a yellow band at the top of the page. This bar contains all the properties that are associated with the feature.

The screenshot below shows more details

Silver Stories has an Enterprise Kanban board to track the flow of MMFs from the story tree. In this screencast we explore the functionality of this board. In the process we show how Silver Catalyst can be linked up to execute upon the backlog created in Silver Stories, and the expand-collapse pattern for enterprise kanban boards.