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Kerika makes FOIA one-click easy

Government, ,

If you work for a government agency in the United States – at the Federal, State, or Local level – you are subject to various public disclosure requirements, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and various other federal and state “Sunshine” laws.

(And, if you work for a governmental organization anywhere in the European Union, that’s going to be true for you as well.)

Kerika makes it one-click easy for you to meet you disclosure requirements, thanks to the Archive and Export feature:

Archiving freezes a project, presumably in it’s “done” state: everyone who used to have access to the project still does, but all cards, canvases and documents associated with that project are made read-only.

This means that you now have a pretty good record for what a project looked like when it was completed: what work was done, by whom, and which documents were used and what conversations took place.

And the kind of integrated, comprehensive view of a done project is something that you can get only from Kerika: the old mix of SharePoint and Project and regular email just doesn’t work!

Exporting is the other piece of the disclosure puzzle: with just one mouse click, you can export all (or some) of the cards in a board, in CSV or HTML format.

Exporting in HTML is particularly helpful when meeting disclosure requests because the HTML output can be easily edited, using Microsoft Word for example, to take out items that need to be redacted for security or privacy reasons.

That’s the difference with a modern project management and team collaboration software like Kerika: the worst part of your government job just became one-click easy.

We have upgraded our SSL Security

Kerika, Technology,

We have upgraded the SSL certificate, used to secure your browser’s connection to kerika.com, from SHA-1 to SHA-2.

Kerika SSL
Kerika SSL

 

(SHA-2 is a cryptographic hashing algorithm developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to replace SHA-1.)

This puts Kerika ahead of moves that Google and Microsoft will soon take, for the Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers, respectively, that will start showing warning signs when you visit a website that uses the older SHA-1 certificates.

If you are not sure whether your favorite secure site has upgraded to SHA-2, Symantec has a helpful tool you can use:

Kerika SSL check
Kerika SSL check

When Projects Get Done: Archive Them

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , , , ,

Here’s another new feature with our latest update: when a project is done, you can drag it to the Archive column on your Home page.

Archiving Projects
Archiving Projects

Archiving a project freezes it: no one can make any changes to it while it is in the Archive, so if you change your mind and want to make some changes to an archived project, you need to drag it back out of the Archive and into your Projects column.

All the documents attached to an Archived Project are frozen: the goal here is to preserve the final/completed state of a project and all its assets, so that later on if you need to investigate a problem — or deal with a FOIA request or some other legal disclosure requirement — you can do so with confidence.

All dates, status, chat and teams are also frozen: if someone was part of an Archived Project’s team at the time the project was moved to the Archive, they will continue to show up on that project team.

If a task had a due date and hadn’t yet been completed (i.e. the card hadn’t yet been moved to the Done column), that due date stays intact.

If the project was a Scrum Board, it will continue to stay attached to the Backlog it was using at the time the board got archived: when you view an archived Scrum Board, it will show that Backlog in it’s current state.  This makes it easy to archive Scrum Boards that represent different Sprints that work off the same shared Backlog!

You can change your mind: If you need to work again on a previously archived project, just drag it out of the Archive column and drop it into the Projects column on your Home Page, and that will “un-archive” (restore) your project.

You can create templates from archived projects: if you drag an archived project and drop it into the Templates column on your Home Page, that will create a template based upon that project, while leaving the project in your Archive.

A small, but hopefully useful, change in how Templates are sorted

Technology

A couple of weeks ago we expanded your privacy choices to make it more easy for your account team to discover your projects and templates, which is something that our enterprise users had been asking for.

With the update we did this past weekend, one small change you might notice is on your Home Page: the Templates column on this page will sort all the available templates like this:

  • Templates you create are shown first; presumably these are the most important ones from your perspective.
  • Next, we show you templates created by other people where you are part of the project team.
  • Next, we show you templates that are being made available to you because they are being shared within account teams.
  • And then, finally, we list all the templates that Kerika itself offers.

Sorting cards in a column just got easier

Technology, Usability,

You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!

Sort By
Sort By

This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:

Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:

  • Critical
  • Is Blocked
  • Needs Review
  • Needs Rework
  • Ready to Pull
  • Hold

This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.

Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.

And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.

You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.

We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards :-)

Sorting cards in a column just got easier

Technology, Usability,

You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!

Sort By
Sort By

This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:

Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:

  • Critical
  • Is Blocked
  • Needs Review
  • Needs Rework
  • Ready to Pull
  • Hold

This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.

Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.

And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.

You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.

We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards :-)

Off-topic, but fantastic: Meet Bill Sowry

Ephemera

OK, so this has nothing to do with Kerika, Lean, Agile or even software for that matter, but this is a great story that we can’t help but share with the world…

Bill Sowry is a Brigadier with the Australian Army, currently posted as Defense Attache in London.

He is 53 years old. And very fit. (This bit is important.)

Bill Sowry
Bill Sowry

Many years ago, he had a tour of duty in India: he joined a long tradition of Australian officers who were selected for specialized training at the Indian Army’s Defense Services Staff College, where his local “sponsor” officer was another up-and-coming officer: Major Mohit Whig of the 2/5 Gorkha Rifles.

Here’s what they looked like back then:

Mohit Whig & Bill Sowry
Mohit Whig & Bill Sowry

Bill had a great time in India and loved the time he spent with the Whig family — Mohit’s cheerful, amiable personality had survived years of front-line action in Sri Lanka, the Indian North-East, and Kashmir.

And Bill retained a fondness for India long after leaving its shores — as he said, “you can take the man out of India, but you can’t take India out of the man.”

Bill and Mohit's family
Bill’s family, Mohit’s family, and friends

 

In 1997, Mohit was killed by an IED in Kashmir: false information was fed to his unit that led to troops being sent into an ambush

Mohit was never one to “lead from behind”. His unarmored Jonga was at the head of the convoy and was blown up by a bomb.

When Mohit died, he left behind a widow and two young sons, one of whom was born with severe spina bifida, which has left him disabled for life.

And there the story might have ended.

OK, so some soldiers go on a mission in insurgent country. They get blown up. Happens all the time. No big deal.

But it didn’t, because Bill is not an ordinary soldier…

A couple of years ago, using Facebook he was able to get back in touch with Mohit’s family (Thanks, Mark Z!)  and learned that Mohit’s younger son needed some critical rehab treatment to give him more independence, especially as he grew to maturity.

This treatment was expensive (£25,000) and unavailable in India, so Bill resolved to raise money for sending Mohit’s son to Australia for rehab.

And he is doing this in a truly spectacular way: a minimum of 4 pushups for every Km. of the Tour de France.

Bill has already over 15,300 pushups over 3 weeks — yes, that’s hundreds of pushups each day!

OK, remember that bit about Bill being 53 years old?

Bill is raising money using the JustGiving site: he has 4 days to go, and a final £5,000 to raise in order to meet his goal.

We have been thrilled to help Bill, and invite you to help him get to the goal line!

Thanks.

Kerika at the PMI Olympia Chapter

Agile & Scrum, Government, Team Collaboration, Technology, ,

Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, and Beth Albertson, Solution Architect at Washington State’s Dept of Social and Health Services, gave a joint presentation at the Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Olympia chapter yesterday.

Beth talked about her experience in moving away from Microsoft Project to online task boards, and Arun talked about the general use of online task boards for distributed teams, Lean teams, and Agile teams, with a special focus on the public sector.

It was a great evening, with dinner served and some great Q&A afterwards!

Too bad we forgot to take pictures :-(

Using Kerika to help fight Ebola

Team Collaboration, ,

James Gien Varney-Wong is putting together global brainstorming team to work on creative solutions for fighting Ebola, and Kerika is helping the team share their ideas and content.

You can learn more about this effort at OpenIDEO, where James has embedded a small part of a massive Kerika Whiteboard that people from many countries are using to share their ideas:

Ideas for fighting Ebola
Ideas for fighting Ebola

It’s an exciting, large-scale use of Kerika Whiteboards, reminiscent of the work done by Charles Fraser for the Foundation for Common Good; you can see that Whiteboard page — as a regular Web page! — by clicking here.

Foundation for Common Good
Foundation for Common Good (Click to see the Whiteboard)