Introducing KAISER

KAISER is a simple and fun app for tracking progress and keeping your team in the loop.

Is your current Project Management app a help or a hindrance?

I have lost count of the number of times I have stared at a project in JIRA, Basecamp, Trello or (insert your favourite app here) and been completely lost. Maybe it’s someone asking a question on Basecamp while the rest of the team are discussing it in an email thread outside of Basecamp. Or maybe it’s a Trello board where you have to scroll left and right every time you want to get the bigger picture because there are too many columns. And it’s probably best if I don’t even bring up JIRA or I won’t be able to stop! In my experience, the majority of teams I’ve worked with feel that the software is more of a hindrance than a help.

Of course, many of the issues aren’t really down to any fault in the app itself. No matter how well-designed the app is, people can still mess things up, right? Human error is definitely a major part of the problem and I’ve seen many well-organised JIRA/Trello/etc projects where the team have clearly invested and made the effort to keep on top of things, but I still feel like these apps could do more to help prevent human errors, at least the most common mistakes.

Take Trello for example — an excellent and very popular productivity tool. I use Trello all the time and it’s perfect for many projects, but would I use it to plan, manage and maintain software? Nope. I’ve tried and while it’s perfectly possible to make it work and live with the limitations, it’s far from ideal.

So what makes KAISER better?

KAISER is a flexible tool and just like apps such as Trello, it’s easy to create badly structured projects with it if you let people try hard enough.

But, unlike Trello, KAISER isn’t a general productivity tool, so if you want to use it to plan your wedding or manage your shopping lists, you’ll be disappointed.

KAISER is for teams who make software. It’s specifically designed to tackle all the critical problems that come up during the development of a software project and above all, it’s designed to be a single environment that all your team can use without compromise.

Read on to find out how it can help your team deliver great quality software on time and on budget.

Project Managers want quick answers to simple questions

If you are a Project Manager, Scrum Master, Lead Developer or anyone that needs to keep track of the project, you’re probably interested in getting quick answers to simple questions, like these for example:

• Is it done yet!!!?
• Is everything running smoothly?
• Is anyone waiting for more work?
• Is the workload well distributed throughout the team?
• The boss wants to see a demo of the “Comments” feature ASAP — where are we on that?

Let’s see how KAISER can help answer these questions. The following screen shows a board from a project being managed by KAISER:

With KAISER, the board is designed to provide as much information as possible, visually, so you can get quick answers to questions you may have during a typical day with a quick glance at the board. For example:

• Is it done yet? Er, no! :-) The little counter next to the Board Title shows there are still 15 tasks and it’s clear from a quick glance at the progress bars that “Search” is the only open task near completion.
• Is everything running smoothly? In general, yes — but there are two blocked items that need attention. We need requirements from Fred for the Gallery feature and we’re stuck on Groups until Friday’s meeting. These aren’t major problems, but something to keep an eye on.
• Is anyone waiting for more work? Both developers could do with more tasks on their queue — there are three backlog items so maybe worth looking to assign them?
• Is the workload well distributed throughout the team? Not really, Paul only has one task and Fred doesn’t even have anything to do right now!
• The boss wants to see a demo of the “Comments” feature ASAP — where are we on that? A quick look at the card shows its early in development (2/10 todos done, 1 bug outstanding), and we can see from the status message that Harold has just started working on the “Comment list” part so it’s too early to demo, for sure.

Developers don’t care about any of this — they just want to focus on their tasks!

While all this visual information is great for Project Manager types, it doesn’t really help developers much. Developers are more interested in focusing on their workload and to do that, they generally want to zone out from all the other stuff going on in the project that isn’t currently relevant to their work.

For example, as a developer, Harold is responsible for implementing the Comments Feature right now and he just wants to focus on that. He isn’t interested in any of the “big picture” issues that the Project Manger cares about. With KAISER, Harold can zone out of all that’s going on around him by simply collapsing all the columns he isn’t interested in, like this:

Even though this is very useful when viewing the board, most of the time Harold is going to be focused on the card he is working on, so in this project, he’ll spend most of his time inside the Comments Card until it’s finished. Clicking on a card opens it up in a separate page, which looks like this:

This page is designed to be the main area for developers working on a high-level task. As explained in Kaiser Flow (see below), the recommended way to structure KAISER projects is to keep cards relatively high-level, so all team members and stakeholders can understand and make sense of them when glancing at the board. It’s the developers who care about breaking things down and providing low-level detail, and that’s exactly what this screen is for.

The TODO section at the top of the screen above looks very simple, but it’s a fully fledged task list. Each item can be re-ordered using drag-and-drop and it’s also possible to assign todos to individual members as well.

Kaiser Flow

This article has described a certain way of working within KAISER. It’s the recommended approach and it’s called Kaiser Flow. It’s based on the following six simple principles:

1. Boards should visually describe the current state of the project at all times.
2. Cards should describe high-level tasks that can be understood by all team members and stakeholders.
3. Breaking down a high-level card is important but should be kept inside the card as implementation detail to avoid flooding the board with too much low-level information.
4. High visibility of blockers is crucial. If a card is blocked for any reason, it should be placed in the BLOCKED column with a status message describing the reason.
5. The team should regularly update the status message of each card they are working on. (If you use SCRUM, it’s a good idea to do this before your daily morning stand-up.)
6. Project workload is best visualised through user-specific task queues.

Summary

I hope this article has convinced you of the benefits of using KAISER and that you might consider using it to manage your next software project. If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment or email me directly at paul.drummond@iode.co.uk.

As for Kaiser Flow, I’ve only touched the surface here so look out for more articles on the subject in the coming weeks, and if you haven’t given KAISER a try yet, click here to sign-up and try it out.