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LeanKit Kanban API & Wrappers
In: Uncategorized
21 Dec 2011As we mentioned in an earlier post, our customers have integrated LeanKit with many different kinds of systems. And we provide services to develop integrations if you don’t have the time or inclination to do this yourself. But, if you do want to develop your own integration, here’s the section in our knowledge base about our API.
http://support.leankitkanban.com/forums/20153741-api
Our customers have initiated the following publicly-available wrappers. If you know of another one please let us know so we can share the information! And if you want to start another wrapper and share it with the world, we’ll make sure to publicize your work. There’s a large (40,000+ users and growing very quickly) audience for LeanKit so it should get you some attention.
And, if you develop a general purpose integration to another popular SaaS product and are willing to share that integration code with your fellow LeanKit customers, we may be able to offset your development cost by trading you for a credit toward your LeanKit subscription. Contact us for details.
Kanban isn’t just for advanced teams
10 Dec 2011You don’t have to be Scrum Masters
One of the things we often hear, you see it all the time on Twitter, is that Kanban might be a good technique but it should only be tried with advanced teams. That you should perfect Scrum first and then move on to Kanban. We couldn’t disagree more.
First, while several of us at LeanKit are CSMs and we think Scrum has its place in the Lean/Agile toolkit, we don’t believe “pure” Scrum works for the whole IT organization. If you are doing mostly greenfield software development then pulling together a dedicated, cross-functional team for a project and using iterations to give them space to focus is great. But. Even most software development teams always deal with a mixture of project work, minor enhancements, and operational support. Break-fixes don’t wait for the next iteration. Having a way to gracefully handle planned work and inevitable interruptions is crucial to Agile success. And for networking, security, server services, CS, etc. the idea of fixing scope for 2-4 weeks and being guided by a single all-knowing product owner is simply unworkable. Their world is defined by interruptions and demand from every direction. So, to say everyone should make it through Scrum first to get to Kanban is absurd.
LeanKit Customer Referral Program
In: Uncategorized
9 Dec 2011A chance for you (and them) to save!
We’ve found that some of our most effective sales people are our enthusiastic customers. They’ve told their friends and colleagues about LeanKit and many of those friends have become customers, too. And they’ve told their friends ….. As a young company, this has really helped us grow. So, we decided to create a program to encourage you to do a little bit more of what we hope you are doing already – sharing your enthusiasm about the power of Kanban to help teams collaborate more effectively.
Use the Spread the news! link to send an e-mail about us to people who you think could benefit from LeanKit. When you click the link, it will pre-populate your message with a bit of sample text including our web address and brief instructions. If you have a personal message to add that’s awesome!
The e-mail tells them to use your e-mail address as a discount code. That way we can keep track of your referrals. They’ll also save 10% when they sign-up so they ought to be motivated to follow instructions! If they become a new LeanKit paying customer of at least five users, you’ll get a $100 credit off your next invoice. There’s a limit of 20 referral credits per LeanKit account, or $2000. But if you’re that good at spreading the word, maybe you should join our sales team!
Thanks so much for choosing LeanKit. We appreciate your help in sharing our message.
Spread the news!
How do I print a big LeanKit board?
In: Uncategorized
5 Dec 2011Many of our customers have very big Kanban boards. LeanKit’s ability to scale to workflows with dozens of people and hundreds of lanes on a single board is what made many of our customers choose us versus other products. Those big boards work great when viewed live on PC monitors, tablets, or big wall screens. But they can be a problem for executive reporting. For some reason, senior managers just love to get print-outs. How can you do that for a board that’s four screens wide and eight screens tall?
We’ve found two browser plug-ins that help a lot. They allow you to save the full screen or a portion as an image. And they even allow you to highlight, circle, use pointer arrows, add text notes, etc. in order to bring attention to key things on the page. In fact, if you’re sending us information about a problem with your account, it’s a really great way to make sure we fully understand what you are seeing!
We can’t guarantee their performance, of course, but they’ve worked well for us so far.
Does LeanKit integrate with X?
28 Nov 2011Here at LeanKit, we’re often asked if our Kanban system integrates with other tools: CRM tools like Salesforce or Dynamics, customer support systems like Remedy, project management tools like MS Project Server, etc. The short answer is, yes! We have a very simple yet powerful API (application programming interface) that allows LeanKit to be connected to most any other tool.
Code can be written that maps LeanKit to the other system and periodically (say every 10 seconds) checks each system for changes and communicates it to the other system. Typically, the idea is to use the other system as the main “database” and implement LeanKit as a visualization layer and measurement system. LeanKit Kanban can make critical information in a legacy system much more accessible.
As you may know, we’ve been working with VersionOne to develop a standard integration between our tools. We anticipate developing a standard interface with Salesforce next year. And many of our customers have written their own integrations, sometimes with a little bit of guidance from us, usually without really needing any help. It’s a pretty easy-to-use API. Read more about some open source API wrappers that customers have written for LeanKit here.
But, even the simplest API requires that you have bandwidth in your IT department to do the work. What if you’d really, really like to connect LeanKit to YOUR SYSTEM NAME GOES HERE, but nobody in your company is available? We can help!
Just contact us at sales@leankitkanban.com to let us know. We’ll arrange a time to discuss your requirements and then prepare an estimate for us or one of our professional services partners to develop your integration.
We’d love to work with you to use LeanKit to bring new visibility into your existing processes.
LSI Webinar – Lean as an Organizational Learning System
In: Uncategorized
20 Sep 2011Please join our partners at the Lean Software Institute for their next webinar, “Lean as an Organizational Learning System” on October 4
About the webinar:
We all admire companies like Toyota and Apple that really care about innovation and the relentless pursuit of perfection – and pull it off! That pursuit is of course never-ending, as customers expect more and as competitors continue to improve. As David Allen likes to say, “The better you get, the better you’d better get!”
But how?
None of these approaches are sufficient in themselves, however, because they don’t explain how an organization actually DOES to get better. What are the actual processes than need to be in place? What are the biggest practical challenges? How do we track progress?
In this webinar we will discuss how Lean Management can help software executives mobilize their employees and managers to learn faster than the competition and deliver more value faster to customers and shareholders.
Register here
Webinar – Beyond Kanban: Lean as an Operating System
In: Uncategorized
19 Aug 2011Our partners at the Lean Software Institute have just announced their new webinar series, “Fit for the Future: Lean and the Software Industry“, and have invited us to join them in presenting the first installment, “Beyond Kanban: Lean as an Operating System“.
When
September 7, 2011, 10:00 PST / 13:00 EST / 19:00 CET
Duration: One hour
Webinar Overview
In this webinar we will discuss how to go beyond Value Stream Mapping and Kanban Boards to create a representation of a business as a “system of systems”. You will learn about the Lean Software Institute’s five-dimensional model for describing business systems, including Product Development Systems. We show how this model can provide breakthrough insights into why organizations encounter performance challenges.
Audience
This webinar series is aimed at CXOs and other senior executives in the IT industry who are attempting to improve their organizations’ productivity, accelerate innovation, enhance financial performance, and improve employee engagement.
Presenter
Frode L. Odegard, Founder & CEO, Lean Software Institute
Guest
Chris Hefley, Co-Founder & CEO, LeanKitKanban
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