Introduction
Calidae is an Information Technology and Services company based in Barcelona, Spain.
We talked to Jordi Medina to understand their Lean journey and how they discovered and implemented Kanbanize. As Jordi says, they were doing Lean from the very beginning before they even knew about Lean and Agile.
Before Kanbanizе
At first, Calidae had introduced a physical Kanban board in their office. However, soon they faced the limitations it held to a mature Kanban implementation. They had difficulties keeping the board in order, counting cards, tracing completed tasks, and pulling statistical data. Spread across two offices and having remote employees, Calidaes management felt the need to a more powerful, digital to help them effectively manage their workflow.
The first unsuccessful attempt was trying Jira for a project and then experimenting with some other tools for Agile project management. In the words of Calidae, all of them somewhat lacked the potential to support a mature Kanban implementation and, more specifically, a powerful analytics and automation functionalities that would help the company reduce waste.
Key Results
The team identifies a few main points when it evaluates the impact of introducing Kanbanize.
Improve efficiency through better visualization
To improve project management efficiency, Calidae applied different Kanbanize functionalities. Apart from the team boards, they have a Portfolio board, where they visualize all big projects. The flexibility of the software allowed them to create custom public filters with aggregated data from different boards, providing all stakeholders with better visualization of their work. Calidae also made use of the various card linking options (children, parents, predecessor, successor, etc.) and managed to visualize complex projects while also keeping the big picture visible at a glance.
Better flow tracking with reliable metrics
Working on complex projects also requires advanced reporting. The teams made use of the Advanced Search Panel to generate different charts by applying custom filter combinations. This way, they were able to extract relevant data to compare projects' performance and profitability and better track their flow performance. The Kanbanize Analytics module allowed them to analyze the workflow based on real data and apply Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Cycle Time Histogram, and more to compare projects and cycle times and continuously improve their KPIs.
"Kanbanize is a useful tool to monitor team members' work and reflect upon what’s happening in projects and their tasks. We stopped making assumptions and started analyzing the reality."
Real-time collaboration and fluent work management
Calidae made use of the flexibility of Kanbanize to create custom workflows for the different swimlanes on their Kanban boards to map their process in the most convenient way. Furthermore, they use Kanbanize to implement a pull system and effectively meet the demand without creating extra expedite items due to lack of capacity.
To further boost the real-time collaboration aspect, Calidae integrated Kanbanize with Slack via Zapier. The team was already using Slack for online project related discussions and integrating it with Kanbanize they applied a combination of mentions and card comments to notify all users and distribute tasks quickly.
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