30Sep

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Where should you go if Trello became too small for you.

There are numbers of tools for managing tasks and projects, one of them is – Trello, a great visualization’ tool. However, when your team grows and appearance of a new roles is creating many difficulties that cannot be solved within Trello – you have right solution to choose. Let me introduce Kaiten – processes’ control tool, that offers problems’ solution for growing company.

Let’s imagine a small technology startup that goes on the market after the product creation. It has a lot of activities that have not related with development, for example: conducting advertising campaigns, customer service, testing of hypotheses. There is a choice between two solutions: to manage all the processes on a single board or to separate different activities. You will lose any opportunity to evaluate everything that happens in your project at a single glance, or will lose a simple task management. This problem is faced not only by Trello users, but also by those who have chosen other solutions.

How can you manage complex workflows without losing the simplicity and clarity by using such tools?

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To simulate complex processes Kaiten offers you to use spaces, which can be filled with several boards. Below you can see an example of a space which contains boards of Planning Department and Development Department. Also you can add here a board with marketing activities that allows you to get a better idea of development’s status and directions on a single screen. Also, developers can operate only in their space and with their own board to concentrate on their own problems.

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As you know, process management is not only the creation of new tasks and implementation’s control, but also it is the work processes organization. Agile-methodologies are gaining popularity and are increasingly used not only in software development, but also in other industries. We’ve talked about Scrum and Agile methods in our article, please check. Unfortunately, Trello does not offer you some tools to use on a Scrum or Kanban project.

Scrum support which you have in Kaiten, allows you to do an iterative development, to interact actively with your customers and respond quickly within requirements’ changes. It helps to obtain a high quality results that meets business’ requirements.

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Kanban’ usage allows you to look at the process as if it is a conveyor that’s delivering a value to the consumer. The methodology offers to push off from the current process and increase team’s performance conducting evolutionary changes. Kanban is closely related to the constraints theory, therefore it offers tools to detect problems.

Focusing on a single metric – which means speed of the supply value, that gives to this methodology an ability to assess quickly the impact of various changes which help team to improve its efficiency. Setting limits allows you to adjust the flow of tasks making your team uniformly busy and make deadlines predictable.

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The next problem which any growing project’ Head will face – it is a necessity to predict completion dates and distribute resources correctly having the presence of a fixed delivery time.

Kaiten’s analytical module allows you to find problems in the current production process and build a reliable prediction of the timing of tasks’ completion or the timing of the whole project completion.

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For example, if you will look at the cycle time schedule you can say that received task will be completed  with a probability of 50% within 4 days or with a probability of 85% in  over 12.

You do not need to guess about what you need to answer to the client regarding the timing of the task. Forecasts cease to be based on subjective developers’ assessments.

Kaiten allows you to make business more stable and predictable, to find new opportunities for growth. If you have already encountered the described problems using Trello – try Kaiten, it has imported boards and cards from Trello. Try it here:

https://en.kaiten.io

We are looking forward to meeting you on our website soshace.com

Task Estimation

First of all, I’d like to mention that everything described below is based on the real experience and is not my personal wishes.

In order to correctly estimate the task, it is necessary to make the following steps in relation to the project:

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