This post was written by Jonathan Baker-Bates, a UX designer at Hotels.com – @gilgongo 

I’m a designer managing the user experience team here at Hotels.com, where we’re always trying to improve the way we work. It’s a tricky job, because regardless of the organization you’re in, no two UX projects are alike. That’s why the best design teams are the ones that can call upon a wide variety of techniques. A large part of a designer’s skill is knowing which techniques to apply to which projects in order to solve design problems. Designers need the freedom to do this – the freedom to do the right thing.

We define our team’s success in terms of getting ideas to market faster than the competition and executing those ideas better for customers than the competition can. I believe the success of any given method to do this depends mostly, if not entirely, on the environment in which it is practiced. I don’t think it depends on whether you’re PRINCE2 compliant, if you have great documentation, or if your time sheets are up to date – nothing will work if your people are unhappy.

Regardless of the environment, you still must apply a framework that allows the best methods to emerge for your operation. For us, Lean Kanban is that framework, and the best tool to enable it is AgileZen, and here’s why:

First, some background. Hotels.com is a large and very complex e-commerce operation. Well over 200 people work in core operations here in central London, with hundreds of others based around the world. We have 85 web sites in 34 languages, and list more than 145,000 hotels in 19,000 locations. We’re big. We know we don’t deliver the best user experience for booking hotel rooms, but we’re trying to improve that.

My team receives business ideas from the Product Team, and works with them on how to execute those ideas. There are another seven Creative Designers who go on to interpret those executions to suit our brand. My team looks after the customers’ heads, while the Creative Designers look after their hearts.

Over the past four years, we’ve tried various methods of working, including home-brew variations of waterfall and Scrum (you can read about our experience here). Kanban works best for us for two reasons:

1. Enabling us to work on projects in whatever manner we choose. There are no sprints, no estimation, no burn-down charts or time sheets. Stakeholders are welcome to specify deadlines for work but rarely do. Instead, we focus on average cycle times. If an estimate of delivery date is needed, those cycle times can be used to plan accordingly. We have no project managers, because they would have nothing to do.
2. Kanban helps us go faster. The process shows the entire team how much “waste” we generate. Waste takes two forms: time wasted when jobs are blocked or waiting for feedback, and time wasted when jobs are waiting on the board for somebody to commence work. We assume that if it is not waste, it is productive work.

Further, we impose a work-in-progress (WIP) limit guideline. Project team members must not work on more than two jobs at once, thereby keeping the project flow quick and efficient.

Our basic metric is the amount of waste. Compared to hours worked or number of jobs complete, it is clearly actionable information. We reduce waste through experimentation: sitting people closer together, attempts at pair designing, cutting out process stages, etc.

The main focus of attention during our projects’ life cycle is our physical Kanban board. The power behind the board’s throne is AgileZen. When we started with Kanban, we ditched Jira, the tool we had been using until that point. We found most digital tools to be overly cumbersome, time consuming, and an end in themselves. Our team hated Jira because of this. AgileZen became our new solution to make our system work.

AgileZen is a joy to use. We’re designers, so the visual nature of a product counts for a great deal. The API gives us potential for flexibility, and unlike other systems, those parts of it we don’t use stay politely out of our way. Crucially, AgileZen’s project management system makes tracking our work and waste very easy. Every day, we have a team stand-up at which the facilitator simply reads jobs and statuses from the AgileZen screen. We keep the tool in sync with our physical board, which is all about team communication.

Designers are not typically process-oriented people. We want something that fits silently in to the way we want to work. AgileZen does just that and is worthy of its name.

If you have questions about how we’re using AgileZen, it would be great to hear from you in the comments.

After releasing our GitHub integration last week and seeing all the positive feedback, we figured Bitbucket should be the next up, another application for source code hosting. This integration works in pretty much the same way as the GitHub integration, so teams that use both Bitbucket and AgileZen can now associate their commit messages with story cards! Please review the Bitbucket article in our knowledge base for detailed instructions on how to get set up with this integration. Once you’re up and running, you can comment in your messages with the AgileZen story card number and have the commit message appear under the changeset list on the story card.

We hope you’ll check it out!

We love supporting the open source community, so we decided to integrate with the Project Hosting on Google Code, a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Our integration with Google Project Hosting allows you to associate commits in your Google Project with story cards in AgileZen. This lets your team stay up to date on the latest development work and view a history of commits for each story. If you’d like more information on how to set this up, please check out our knowledge base article.

If you’re actively working on an open source project and want to use AgileZen to manage your work, we have a free account with one project and unlimited collaborators specifically for open source! Please contact us at giving@agilezen.com with information about your project and a link to your repository, so we can get you set up.

The new year is a time to reflect on the past and set goals for the future. In that spirit, I’d like to share information about the past year and where we’re going with AgileZen in 2012.

In 2011, we focused a lot of our effort on hiring a solid team of people with the right mix of experience and culture fit. We started the year with 3 people and ended with 6, and it’s been great to see us all work together and have fun!

We also made huge improvements to our infrastructure. We moved our systems from dedicated servers to Amazon AWS, which has improved uptime and performance, and has allowed us to do zero-downtime deployments. We also spent a good deal of time on other back-end work, including a new architecture centered around a messaging bus. This allowed us to move some processes, like our notification system, from the .NET codebase into Node.js. While this took longer than we’d hoped and wasn’t customer-facing, we’re really happy with where we are now. This new architecture was necessary to put into place in 2011 to support the direction we want to take the product in 2012.

Lastly, we focused on releasing features customers have been asking for, from our API to integrations with HipChat and Campfire. We’re continuing work on the integration front with the release of GitHub integration a week or so ago and BitBucket, Google Code, and a few others in process right now. There are articles specific to these releases on the blog if you’re interested, but let’s move on to 2012.

This year, we’ll add to the team again. I’m (personally) really excited about this, since building a great team is one of the best things about my job. Right now, we have two open positions on the engineering side, and we’ll likely be adding several other people to the business side too. We’re working out the exact number now, so I’ll be posting information about our openings to the blog as it becomes available.

Alex, our most recent hire, joined us late in 2011 to run all things marketing, so we’ll be making some significant progress on this front in 2012. We’ll be spending more time creating content like writing blog posts and making videos; not only will this be fun for us, but we’ll be able to improve the information we make available to customers too. We also plan to sponsor more events, especially those in the Raleigh area. It’s a personal goal of mine to support the local entrepreneurial community, so those are the types of events that will be on our radar.

The biggest marketing initiative this year will be redesigning our marketing site. This will include a new look and feel and updated content! We’re working with a firm to make this happen, and we just started the process. We hope to have something available in April, so I’ll be blogging about it when we get a little further along.

On the development front, we’re in the process of completely re-writing the user interface. We’re essentially re-building that side of the product with real-time updates baked into the core of the product. While the goal is to get to feature parity with the current product as soon as we can, there will also be some changes to implement along the way. We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing all our customer feedback and taking into account the team’s brainstorming sessions and have a great plan in the works.

Above all else, we’ve always been interested in solving the problem of helping people work together more effectively. After a couple of years of talking with our customers and better understanding the difficulties they encounter on a daily basis, we believe we’ve identified an opportunity to solve this problem in a new way. We haven’t quite finished baking it yet, but when it’s done the new version of AgileZen will help you stay organized and communicate more effectively than ever.

That’s all we can tease about right now, but stay tuned over the next few months!

This post was written by Deepa Ahluwalia, founder of EventHelix -@eventhelix | EventHelix.com 

EventHelix develops tools that let you visualize complex interactions with sequence diagrams. Diagrams can be generated at different levels of abstraction. We have two tools: EventStudio System Designer 5 and VisualEther Protocol Analyzer 1.0.

AgileZen has helped us rethink our development. We used to do a major release of EventStudio every two years. Once we started using AgileZen we moved to a quarterly release cycle as AgileZen encourages iterative development. In addition to this, we are now able to track customer feature requests and development in the same place.

The life cycle of the stories is:

1. Backlog: Customer requests are added in to the backlog. We copy the customer request e-mails as a comment. The request is distilled into tasks inside the story.
2. Ready: During release planning, stories are moved to the ready state. More details are added to the stories and they are marked ready-to-pull.
3. Working: Stories move here when we are working on them. When the code has been reviewed and tested, the ready-to-pull flag is set.
4. Completed: Stories move here after the feature has been checked into SVN. The subversion check-in information is stores as a comment. The ready-to-pull flag is set after the documentation has been updated.
5. Archive: Stories are moved out of the project when the release is uploaded to the website.

Today we released the integration of AgileZen and GitHub, a collaborative code repository. This means that teams that use both tools can now associate their commit messages in GitHub with story cards in AgileZen! To get started, check out our help article with detailed instructions. Once everything is set up, users can comment in their GitHub messages with story card numbers in AgileZen and the commit messages will appear under the changeset list on the story card. We thought it would be useful to have visibility into commits as part of AgileZen, since the product serves as an information radiator for customers.

We love GitHub and we’re looking forward to using the integration on our team!

This post was written by Michael Neel of FuncWorks – @ViNull | ViNull.com

Two years ago I was sitting down with a good friend and talented developer in Panera Bread and asked the question: Why aren’t we working for ourselves? Dylan and I both worked as corporate developers and have each at one time struck out as independent contractors. Even as an “independent” contractor though you’re not working on your own stuff, you’re at best a hired gun with free range to make decisions and at worst stuck in a contract with the client from hell who is more interested in feeling self important than the success of the product.

We came together and formed FuncWorks, LLC with the only goal of making stuff ourselves. We started out and made a few t-shirt sites for designers we knew, thinking we could build a source of income off the t-shirt sales to leverage other projects. It didn’t work.

We then decided to create an Xbox 360 game, IncaBlocks. It was a small scoped puzzle/board game that we were able to complete and ship in about 3 months. We were not expecting a hit, the game was really meant to be our exploration into the world of Indie Game development. Commercially, the game flopped (we never received one cent!).

From our experience with IncaBlocks we decided to create GameMarx.com, a video game news and review site dedicated to covering Xbox Indies. We pulled out all the stops for this one, setting up a video studio for green screen shoots, getting 1080p cameras, building our own teleprompter, and getting a solid solution for recording HD game play from an Xbox 360. Over time it’s become clear Microsoft isn’t promoting or enhancing the Xbox Indies channel, and the service looses many talented game developers who move on to other platforms because they cannot generate sales on the service that they can elsewhere. This means our site covering Xbox Indies really can’t hope to make much either!

Along the way we picked up XboxIndies.com and brought together sites coving Xbox Indies like GameMarx to increase visibility for everyone. The site runs a database of Xbox Indie games, links to news and reviews from around the web, and keeps a history of game rankings on Microsoft’s Best Selling, Top Downloaded, and Top Rated game lists in 10 countries.

So where are we now? GameMarx is becoming developer focused as we are returning to game development with our tentative title Captain Dubstep. We’ve learned quite a bit about game development since IncaBlocks and our goal is to make fun games we can showcase. XboxIndies will continue to share content for gamers interested in Xbox Live Indie Games and add more features like expanding the Game Data API.

AgileZen has been our co-pilot through all of this. We are agile, in spirit and process. FuncWorks operates only in spare moments, and it’s essential to have good communication. I manage priorities just by moving some stories around, and can see where everyone is at with just a glance. We would not have been able to build IncaBlocks, our first full game on any platform, inside of 3 months without AgileZen’s project management software. AgileZen helped us migrate both GameMarx and Xbox Indies to Microsoft Azure in less than two weeks. While we have yet to have our breakout “hit” we have always shipped.

The freedom and flexibility AgileZen provides in defining our own flow is my favorite feature. In addition to using it on all the projects above, I use the AgileZen project management system for non-code projects as well. I use it to plan CodeStock, an annual developers conference in Knoxville, TN. Tasks and deadlines might be “improper” for a Kanban board to some – to me they are perfect for making sure guides are sent to the printer on time and tracking which sponsors owe me a logo and I’m glad AgileZen has these features. I use AgileZen to manage my daily task load. I’ve recommended AgileZen and Kanban to friends looking to organize life’s little tasks.

AgileZen is open everyday on my desktop – I don’t know how I lived without it!

This post was written by AgileZen user and Rally coach Ben Carey – @bencarey

As an Agile Coach at Rally, I’m constantly looking for places to apply and learn more about new and emerging practices in both Agile and related disciplines. One of the ways that I do this is by maintaining a variety of passion-based projects and products that help me continuously learn and try out new approaches, practices, and theories. I was recently sharing how I was using Agile Zen on one of these projects and the team asked if I would share it with the larger community.

Fresh is a golf review site that focuses on reviewing high-end golf gear for progressive golfers. It’s one of those small side projects that never seems to end. Fresh initially started as a platform for me to try a variety of experiments related to Lean Startup concepts. Over the past six months the site has grown significantly and it’s quickly carving out it’s own niche among the golf review sites, blogs, magazines, and web sites.

Since day one, I’ve coordinated and visualized the work required for Fresh in AgileZen. Zen has given me the ability to visualize and observe the nature of the work that is required to keep the site going. In the past six months I’ve been through five or six versions of the board to model the workflow and I’ve (mostly) settled on the board that you see below.

The board allows me to quickly see where things are, to track the various flow metrics, to see bottlenecks, and to get an idea of where things currently stand at a glance. Given that Fresh is a side-project and the work is very stop-and-go, the ability to get re-oriented quickly is a huge advantage for me. A quick glance at the board lets me know where things are and helps me prioritize my efforts based on the funnel of reviews that are currently working their way through the system.

The review work of the site is highly dependent on outside companies and delegated work. Everything from the initial review requests, the back-and-forth of the conversations with the manufacturers, and the shipping of the product is very lightweight work on my end. All of this work is highly dependent on the companies that manufacture the products that are reviewed. Some companies turn around requests in hours and some take months. One of the benefits of Zen that I’ve noticed over time is the ability to see the patterns in how long companies sit in each column.

As far as WIP-limits are concerned, I’ve bounced back and forth between various limits for various columns. For the upstream columns (those that are related to getting product to review) – I’ve currently removed limits (although I still track performance to maintain a healthy flow of products). As the site has gained in popularity I’ve seen a significant conversion and throughput increase in the amount of time it takes for review equipment to make it to my front door. For the Reviewing column, I’ve currently set a limit of 3 items (the number of items I can be reviewing on the golf course). Every once in a while I’ll break that limit (as in the screenshot) because the type of items can be reviewed easily together. I will review an item for around a month on average before publishing the review. The downstream work of Publishing and Wrapping Up (contacting the manufacturer and posting to social channels) goes really fast and I rarely see anything sit in those columns for more than a few hours.

As far as the cards on the board go, I frequently use a mixture of the mark-down capability and tags to annotate the cards in different ways. For the cards on the board posted above, you can see that the card includes the manufacturer and the item that is being reviewed. After an item makes it into the Reviewing column, I add the suggested retail price of the item (this is data I track corresponding to my pirate metrics). I also use tags for the categories (which correspond to the categories on Fresh) and to track various other data that I might need to perform any type of measurements on. The tags can be used as filter criteria while looking at the board or reviewing performance.

In addition to the Fresh Review Board I also have a typical board that is a fairly familiar-looking kanban board. Anytime I do any work to the site, experiment with various business models, or do any type of user testing or validation, it makes it onto the standard board. While managing the two boards is a bit more involved – the nature of the work has a purely different context and the two boards feel justified in their existence.

Agile Zen has been a great tool for me and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to watch my boards evolve with the various changes in structure and approaches to Fresh. Although I’m really using Zen as more of a personal kanban for Fresh (it’s primarily just me) – the value of seeing the work and observing the nature of the system has been incredibly valuable.

If you have questions (or recommendations) about how I’m  using Zen, then please feel free to comment. And if you golf, be sure to go and check out Fresh :)

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with Campfire, a web app for real time group collaboration. Like our HipChat integration, Campfire can be used to see notifications about the status of work items, so you can get updates about AgileZen story cards along with your chat. This means that even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a specific room in Campfire. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your Campfire User API Auth Token and the Campfire Room URL to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

Many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site, so be sure to check those out too. If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with HipChat, a private group chat and IM client for businesses that has features like file sharing, video and voice chat, and cool emoticons. This integration allows HipChat to be used as another stream for notifications about work items. What this means for you is that you can get updates about story cards along with your chat if you’re using both tools. Even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a team room in HipChat. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your HipChat Auth Token and the Name or ID of the room you use for chat to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

While this is our first integration, many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site. We have a lot of integrations planned for the future, but we started with this one for a few reasons. First, we use HipChat and we love it. We also use the GitHub/HipChat integration and have found it very useful for visibility in to what’s being committed. Our friends over at Adzerk use both AgileZen for project management and HipChat for team communication and thought it would be useful if they could have information about their work items from AgileZen posted to HipChat. We thought that this would also be really useful for us too, so Nate started working on a proof of concept for Freeform Friday, our version of hack days.

For the proof of concept, Nate created the AgileZen “cash register”, so that every time a customer buys an account, it posts that information to the chat. It’s a great way for everyone to have visibility into the number of new customers, and it’s definitely a motivator to see all the new sales as they come in. Now that we’ve been using this for a while, it was time to take Nate’s hack project and make it into a customer-facing feature. With a few tweaks, we created the integration of AgileZen and HipChat.

We’ve also released the source of the node.js HipChat library that drives the integration. It’s pretty simple, and just does what we need it to do. (Pull requests are appreciated if you’d like to add features!)

If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!