In SEP TeamWorks and Visual Learning, I wanted to convey the visual nature of** TeamWorks** as a fresh reinvention of Kanban clarity. In this post, I want to focus on TeamWork’s organizational aspects of digital linkage and storage that I like. So with TeamWorks, we have a beautiful pictorial representation of our Kanban board stored digitally. Now we can get the benefits of learning from our project history, and from project metrics.
- Start with the search function, modestly hidden and gracefully retrieved via the iconic magnifying glass, lower right. I am currently on a legacy project of some serious scope. I’ll typically need to find a recent, open bug, plus an older, closed one on a similar topic. Maybe I’ll need to find all upgrade tasks in the project to accommodate a newer browser. Sometimes I’ll need to find a change request that I think ‘Joe’ worked on last. The search function is unobtrusive and readily available at the same time. I can search by word, number or ‘assigned to’ team member, as well as estimate or start/end dates, depending on how you have customized your tickets.
- The flow is the same as the Kanban board. I see proposed, active, resolved and closed issues in a flow from left to right, and top to bottom within columns. Linkage is a piece of cake, too. I can right click on any of the issues and add or edit a block, link it as parent, child or relation to another existing issue, or create a new issue off of the linkage action, just as if I were adding Post-Its to the board.
- I love being able to zip around in TeamWorks, and have all of my updates save in TFS without reading tiny text and trudging down through outline layers. I love being able to open a TeamWorks ticket, click the link there to the user story, and have confidence that I have exactly the right user story (and its tests) for the issue at hand.
- TeamWorks facilitates metrics-based management. Team leads can easily see what is complete, and what needs finishing in the iteration. Tickets can be customized so managers can track what metrics are important to a particular team. My teams have used TeamWorks as a complement to the physical Kanban board for stand-ups.
