SwiftKanban turns 10!
2020-21 has been a tumultuous year. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought some of the worst as well as the best challenges that the world has faced. In the face of these challenges, and with the help of our customers and partners, Digité – especially all our people – also scaled up and managed to continuously deliver outstanding products, features and customer service.
And, in the midst of all of these changes SwiftKanban turns 10!
It was in 2011 that SwiftKanban made a small, but exciting entry into the world of Lean/ Agile tools! Built with active support from the small but growing Kanban community, lead by David J Anderson, the well-known Kanban Method pioneer, SwiftKanban was our first real foray in the Agile stage.
As Kanban has grown in stature, SwiftKanban has slowly and surely consolidated its place in the Enterprise Kanban market as one of the best Kanban tools! Our customers and partners, but especially our enthusiastic users have helped us get there with innovative ideas and extensive usage that has given us invaluable insights into how our product gets used.
We have been able to delegate tasks better, which has resulted in faster completion of work. We have observed a better overall flow and smooth completion of work. Finally, SwiftKanban has helped shorten our Lead Time.
- VICTORIA HELENA THOMPSON, AGILE ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTANT, LUIZALABS
Our 10th Year: Filled with Exciting Developments!
During 2020-21 – the 10th year of SwiftKanban’s existence – we have continuously brought out a series of exciting new features and other enhancements that have brought us kudos from our customers and won us plaudits from our partners and well wishers. Here’s what we have done to celebrate our 10th Anniversary:
Portfolio Kanban got a Serious BOOST!
We started this year with the launch of two exciting new capabilities in our Portfolio Kanban capabilities
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Customizable Progress Rollup Logic: We introduced the concept of card-type-wise rollup of progress information to meet the needs of different working styles of different types of teams – portfolio management teams, marketing teams, IT and software teams and so many more.
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Portfolio – or % Progress – Column: We enabled our users to define an extended portfolio lane with sophisticated workflow capabilities, including the % progress column. In other words, instead of the basic Ready-In Progress-Done workflow, you can now define the exact workflow you need to model your portfolio management process!
Story Mapping - a Boon for Product Owners and Managers
The concept of Story Mapping has gained in popularity since its definition and the first publication of the book on the topic by Jeff Patton in 2012. While there are several tools that enable Story Mapping in isolation, we launched our Story Mapping product with tight integration to SwiftKanban (and SwiftEnterprise) so that Story Maps created in the product seamlessly became a feed to the Kanban board backlog in SwiftKanban, enabling product owners, scrum masters and teams to easily plan releases and sprints right from the Story Map itself.
Each Kanban Board can have multiple story maps feeding its backlog.
Visual Roadmapping/ Agile Program Management
Whether you are a product company or a projects organization, you need to be able to manage “multiple efforts” – call them products, projects, initiatives, or something else – being executed by multiple teams, across multiple products or applications or customers.
Whatever be your business, if you have adopted Agile in your organization, then you will love our Agile Program Management or Roadmapping capability. This module enables you to plan in incremental cycles, using the agile framework of your choice, with a planning hierarchy of your choice/ nomenclature.
Using Epics, Features and User Stories – OR – OKRs – Program Initiatives – Epics – whatever be your standard, you can quickly and easily model and visualize your entire organization’s key imperatives for the year and quarter, create projects or releases/ sprints to execute to those imperatives and assign them to specific teams at team level boards.
Then, using the Roadmapping/ APM module, you can quickly visualize the status of the overall work, forecast completion and delays and take corrective action as needed
Business Rules for Sophisticated - and automated - workflows!
Earlier this year, we launched our Business Rules capability. With this add-on module, you can easily setup automation rules and define other conditions – that automate complex – as well as mundane tasks.
Whether you create new cards, or modify/ move existing cards, you can easily create a set of rules that mimic the actions as if the user were taking them.
And NOW……… Here is SwiftKanban 10.0!!
SwiftKanban 10.0 is the best version of SwiftKanban yet, combining all of the capabilities mentioned earlier AND bringing you a bunch of new capabilities as well!!!
New Board Layout! Find your MOJO!
But – YOU spoke, we heard! We learn every single day, based on your usage pattern of SwiftKanban. Knowing what features you use, how often you use them and how easily accessible they are, we have put together a brand new layout of the board actions (commands/ navigation links or menus) as well as commonly used search and filter options.
You will notice new menu bars or panels on the left and the top – that will more easily get you to what you need to do. At the same time, interacting with these features has become faster and smoother. Go ahead – give these new menus a test drive – and let us know how you like them!
Sample Board Metrics shorten the Learning Curve
While having sample metrics may not seem like a big deal to many, they are invaluable for our consulting and training partners who like to use SwiftKanban for demonstrating the power of the Kanban Method!! Having to build data from scratch and waiting for some of the metrics to compute can take a long time.
No longer! Now, at the flick of a switch, anyone using SwiftKanban – experienced, long time users or newbies who have just set up their trial account – can get to see the full power of Kanban and the SwiftKanban analytics that are so loved by our experienced users. These sample metrics have been generated using 6 months of real user data and will give you a real feel for the life of a Kanban team! Go ahead and check them out.
The Power of AI/ ML: New Similarity Recommendations Engine!
We have been developing our AI and ML workbench of tools for quite some time now. You will have noticed the Chatbots – both within the product and on our website – ready to answer your questions – and improving with each new question asked.
With 10.0, we have our newest capability – included in the software for ALL users! You can now get a “similarity recommendation” based on the past data in your boards for new cards being entered on any board. You can configure exactly how you believe the system can find similar items (within your own board or other teams’ boards as well).
Within minutes, you will start to see the system providing a list of other cards that appear to be similar to the one you are creating or modifying. Imagine the amount of precious time and creative effort your teams will save not entering duplicate tickets, issues or defects, and not solving problems that have ALREADY been solved by someone else in your team or elsewhere in your organization!
STOP reinventing the wheel over and over!
Thank YOU!
We are so excited to bring you all these new capabilities, with the strong belief that these will make your teams and the organization more productive and efficient than ever, while freeing up your valuable resources for greater innovation and delivery of value!
If you are an existing user and / or customer, or a partner/ well wisher – a HUGE THANK YOU! Without you, we would not have made it this far. Without your active engagement, we would not be able to improve. We hope you love these new changes. We would love to hear your feedback.
If you are trying out SwiftKanban for the first time, we hope you like what you see, and that you will stay and become a long term user and preferably a paying customer. In any case, do drop us a line, when you can, to tell us how you like SwiftKanban.
