This is the first in a series of interviews we are publishing with users of the beta product. Interested in being a part of a user interview? Comment below or email us.

Bertrand Vidal, Software Engineer at LTU Technologies

Please introduce yourself, your team, and what you’re working on.

LTU provides cutting-edge image recognition technologies and services to global companies and organizations such as Adidas, Kantar Media and Ipsos. LTU’s solutions are available on-demand with LTU Cloud or on an on-premise basis with LTU Enterprise Software. These patented image recognition solutions enable LTU’s clients to effectively manage their visual assets – internally and externally – and innovate by bringing their end-users truly innovative visual experiences. In an image-centric world, LTU’s expertise runs the image recognition gamut from visual search, visual data management, investigations and media monitoring, to e-commerce, brand intelligence, and mobile applications.

Our technical teams use KANBAN and continuous integration to maintain the high quality standard LTU is known for, and to avail of our small size to quickly react to change. The 7 developers and 2 product owners are spread across 3 differents cities in 2 time zones: Paris, Lyon, and New York.

How does your team use AgileZen, and why?

Each product has its own board and each board has its own workflow (different WIP limit, different phases, …). When a new cycle starts for one of our products and the content has been decided, the team and the product owner gather to split the cycle into Stories. We try to make them as small as possible and as precise as possible so anyone can start working. Then each team member is assigned a Story and from there the developer can customize the Story as needed. Some use Tasks, some others use Tags, we even allow to break them into smaller Stories if need be.

Since our development team is spread over 3 locations and 2 timezones, we needed an online board so everyone would know what was going on in the current cycle. Our CTO needed a tool to follow the evolution of the team’s work and AgileZen offers just that (e.g. Throughput, Lead Time, and so on). We also wanted to be able to move Stories around easily – to export data into other tools. Using the AgileZen API made that painless. The API and a lot of git aliases allowed us to make our work smoother and simpler. We can now create a new git branch and specify the id of a Story; this will move the card to the “Working” column and automatically assign the Story.

What challenges does your team face around collaboration?

Being spread over 2 timezones is probably the biggest issue since it sometimes slows down our work flow. Other challenges around collaboration have been answered by appropriate tools, including AgileZen.

How has your experience been with the beta version?

The team has been using the original product for almost 3 years now. Those of us who have been testing the beta version have only positive feedback. The 2 biggest improvements for us are the ability to better manage the Stories in the backlog, and the right Focus Panel describing a Story when selected. The backlog should now be considered as a seperate board made just for planning and the distinction between backlog and the board was very important to us. This makes the Story selecting and sorting process faster. The right side Focus Panel allows fast access to the Story details without leaving the board, making the Story management even smoother.

Recently, Rally (our parent company) acquired Flowdock, a collaboration tool for teams. Flowdock includes real-time chat and a shared team inbox that aggregates activity from project management tools, version control systems, operations monitoring, customer feedback channels, etc.

We have used Flowdock for some time, and by dogfooding it with AgileZen, have a great understanding of how the products work together. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be writing a bit about how we use AgileZen and Flowdock to collaborate on our work more effectively. A deeper integration is in the works, but for now, check out the following for details on how to set up the existing integration (available on the beta version of AgileZen).

Our Team’s AgileZen – Flowdock Setup
We are currently using the publicly-available AgileZen to Flowdock integration as a team working on the AgileZen beta product. Below is a screenshot of our Flow’s inbox, complete with updates from our board:

This integration helps keep the team aware of what work is being done while we are conversing in our Flowdock Flow, and allows us to have direct conversations around work items:

This keeps us from having to break our workflow or change applications when needing information about a specific card or story.

Set up the Integration :: Step 1: Retrieve Your Flowdock API Token
In order to integrate your AgileZen board with your Flowdock Flow, you first need to get your Flowdock API token. This can be found by logging in to the Flow you want to integrate and clicking the “Settings” icon:

Next, copy the “Flowdock API Token”:

Set up the Integration :: Step 2: Add the Token to your AgileZen Project
On your AgileZen project, click the “Settings” icon:

On the “Integrations” tab, click the green “+” button:

In the modal window, paste your Flowdock API Token in the text box and click “Save”:

That’s it! The integration is up and running and your AgileZen project updates will be pushed to your Flowdock Flow’s inbox.

In the coming weeks, we will be delving more deeply into our process and how we use AgileZen and Flowdock to effectively collaborate and get work done.

This is the first in a series of interviews we are publishing with users of the beta product. Interested in being a part of a user interview? Comment below or email us.

Sarel van der Walt, Software and Development Manager at Afrihost

Please introduce yourself, your team, and what you’re working on.

I’ve been developing software since primary school and have grown from Application Development to Web Development to Web Application Development and specialized in integrations between systems. Currently I’m the Software and Development Manager at Afrihost where I’ve been working for just under 6 years now. Our Dev Team is 8 souls strong, and are responsible for the internal and external systems related to the Afrihost products. The systems range from our Client Management Backend (back-office system), our billing engine, automated deployments of servers and services, and lastly but not least our Client Zone. Everything is web based and the background scripts are written in PHP (on top of Symfony Framework). Our team adheres to some variation and blend between SCRUM and KANBAN and some other stuff we learned along the years. Generally we try to react to market changes and new products within one workday. We pride ourselves that we can deploy a completely new product in way less time than our competitors, which made us the #1 privately owned ISP in South Africa, winning the “MyBroadband.co.za ISP Of the Year” two consecutive years in a row and we’re working hard for our third.

How does your team use AgileZen, and why?

Everything we do becomes a story in AgileZen, and we try as far as possible to put the steps in Tasks. The reason we picked AgileZen was simplicity and price. It takes a major time investment understanding and setting up many other products, where as with AgileZen it was a plug-and-play solution for us, we could merely add the members to it, and start using it. The most time we spent was customizing the columns, which was less than 30 minutes.

What challenges does your team face around collaboration?

A lot of times more than one person is assigned to a story, and it’s tough to then collaborate on the different parts of a story, so we’ve limped along with email subject naming conventions to create a thread of discussion about a user-story. Also, the sad truth is that a lot of times we just don’t have the time to collaborate on everything, so certain parts of the system is developed without the rest of the team knowing anything about it (or very little about it). We do, however, find that our stand-up meetings in the morning which we do always makes a huge difference.

What challenges does your team face around getting work done?

Interruptions are probably the biggest challenge. Unfortunately, with a high-speed business, that comes with the territory. Other than that we don’t have major problems. Sometimes projects do get put on hold, but that’s always when something that adds more value comes up, and we generally get back to the original project rather quickly.

Share one way that the beta has improved your team’s ability to collaborate and/or get work done.

The entire team has not been added to the Beta version yet, we have only evaluated the Beta to compare it to other mainstream products out there to make sure AgileZen is something we want to stick to, and at this time we’re happy (and happy with the beta) with what it gives us.

Greetings!

I’m Jayme Davis, the technical lead on the AgileZen team. I wanted to share some of the plans here at AgileZen about where we are going in the future, and how we are getting there.

The Old AgileZen

I know many of you love this product. We love it too, and you’re welcome to continue using it. We’ll continue to fix bugs and make minor enhancements, but hopefully it’s obvious by now that our primary focus is the new AgileZen which we believe will take our product to the next level being fully real-time. Our goal is to migrate all of our old customers to the new AgileZen. Let us know what features are missing or what is stopping you from migrating to the new AgileZen.

The New AgileZen

Thank you also to all of our customers who are trying the new AgileZen. Our team is entirely focused on developing and improving the new AgileZen. We are slowly but surely migrating users to the new system. The new AgileZen has many benefits over the old application. There are real-time updates for working closely with your team and an iPad app that works in real-time with the web.  About the iPad App, since it’s release in January we’ve had over 1000 downloads representing more than a third of the beta users.  If you haven’t tried this out, I’d encourage you to….you can click here.

Is the new AgileZen perfect? Nope. Do we want it to be? Yep. We have recently switched gears to a new process that will involve heavy testing, improving quality, dramatic UI enhancements, and continuous delivery. If the new AgileZen is not ready for you at this time, that’s ok.

I personally take your feedback very seriously. I enjoy writing software and enjoy hearing feedback about what users like and don’t like about our software. Please feel free to bombard us with feedback (click the little question mark in the top right of the new AgileZen) or email me directly at jdavis@rallydev.com. Send a tweet to @agilezen or me personally at @jaymed if you prefer that as well. All feedback is welcome.

There are many other process improvements and changes coming soon. More about this on future posts!

Jayme

Last Thursday we announced support for public boards and UI updates to the beta AgileZen. Below are the important UI changes that were introduced:

Minimized Header

A major goal of our product redesign was to simplify and beautify the AgileZen interface and experience. Our latest iteration focused on getting us closer to that goal. The minimized, simplified header is a way to keep the view clean by displaying only what is 100% necessary.

The header content is fairly self-explanatory, with the major nuance being the new menu toggle button (top left hand corner in the above image). This button allows you to toggle between displaying and hiding the column containing the menu and activity stream. Here is a view of the button in its “on” state, with the menu column showing:

In addition, we received feedback that the iconography was confusing, so we added corresponding text to each menu item.

Fully-Collapsable Menu and Activity Stream

As shown above, the menu and activity stream are now 100% collapsable. In the previous UI, the activity stream was, at its very minimal, an icon-heavy view that was not as utilitarian as we would have otherwise hoped. The new activity stream is fully collapsable for a more compact, beautiful board view (we’ll get to that in a moment), and was made easier to read with the light-on-dark contrast scheme. This was done in order to make it obvious that the board and activity stream column are separate entities.

Moving the menu to the same column allowed us to further simplify the header and allow for easier navigation throughout the application. The collapsable menu persists over all views, including the “Planning” and “Settings” screens.

Updated Focus Panel

The changes to our focus panel were less extreme and obvious than those made to the header, menu, and activity stream. Our main focus in updating the focus panel’s UI was to make the entire system more intuitive and user-friendly. The view itself is cleaner than the previous iteration, while maintaining the essential functionality of interacting with individual card items.

Support for Public Boards

Public Boards allow you to share a read-only copy of our AgileZen board with anyone with an internet connection. On the “Basics” tab of the “Settings Screen”, you now have the ability to set your board as “Public”, which in turn gives you the project URL which can be shared with anyone, regardless of whether they have an AgileZen account or not.

These Public Boards help us on our way supporting Rally for Impact, a foundation dedicated to offering assistance to non-profits, citizen engineers, students, and open-source collaborators.

A special thanks to our community for the ongoing support of our beta release. We are happy to announce that signups are now completely open – no invite required. In addition, we have added support for Public Boards - read-only AgileZen boards that are available to share with anyone and everyone. This benefits individuals who are not a direct part of your AgileZen project. For example, open source collaborators and browsers who wish to learn more about a specific project are not required to be members of the project on AgileZen (similar to the model that GitHub has used).

We have also made a slew of UI improvements. We received a great deal of feedback during our invite-only beta period, and have made tweaks accordingly. In the spirt of being lean and agile, we are working on making incremental changes from now on in order to improve our users’ experience. Of the entire app, our UI is the most consistent work in progress, with changes (and the required ‘git push’) made on an ongoing basis.

As always, we appreciate your support, and please keep the comments coming.

Zapier is a great way for users to push data between AgileZen and 60+ other services. Some cool examples you might try:

- Sync your help desk software to create cards in AgileZen when new tickets are submitted

- Create a new card, task, or comment in AgileZen through email

- Set new orders in Shopify to create new cards in AgileZen

- Send a tweet, SMS, or Yammer message when a card is finished in AgileZen

Setting this up is easy! Zapier does all the work for you. :) All you need from your AgileZen account is an API key. Follow these instructions to create an API key and get started: http://help.agilezen.com/kb/getting-started/api-overview#api_key

What are you waiting for? Check out Zapier and get to integrating!

This is a guest post written by Andy Trainer of Silicon Beach Training

Effective communication is key to any successful relationship, not least within a project team. As a project manager – or any professional person in business – you need to really listen to what those around you are saying. Improving your listening skills means you are more likely to fully understand a situation – and will also earn you the respect of others.

Learning project management techniques such as PRINCE2 will give you the theory and resources to run successful projects. Similarly, becoming familiar with project management software such as AgileZen will support your project management efforts, and make your working life easier to manage.

It’s also important to keep up with ‘soft’ management skills such as the importance of active listening – they have a significant impact on the team and ultimately the success of the project.

After a day of meetings or during a hectic work schedule, you may find you tune out and find it hard to focus. These tips will not only help you take in all the information you are given, but ensure the speaker’s confidence in your attention and interest.

1. Body language is key. Turning to face the speaker will not only show them you’re listening but will make it easier for you to avoid distractions.
2. Speaking of which, do what you can to reduce potential distractions. Make sure both you and the speaker are turned away from your computers, that phones are on silent and out of reach, and that you aren’t likely to be interrupted. If it means moving to another room then so be it.
3. Hold eye contact. This should come naturally if you follow tips one and two, but is certainly worth being aware of the difference it can make to your listening skills and the confidence you instil in others.
4. Hold back your internal monologue and focus on what the speaker is saying. They may be listing problems that need to be addressed, but wait until they’ve finished before you start trying to come up with solutions. You may miss out on other important parts of what they are saying – and they may already have solutions to present to you later on.
5. Show active listening by responding to what they are saying – but don’t force it. Nodding, murmuring and making facial expressions are fine but don’t let coming up with appropriate responses become a distraction in itself!
6. If you have something to say in return, don’t interrupt. If it’s important then it will still be relevant when they finish.
7. Similarly, keep an open mind if your instinct is to disagree. You may find concerns are quelled if you keep on listening and, if not, you can always raise these when they’ve finished speaking.
8. A common trap to fall into is to interrupt with words of support or advice, e.g., you might feel the urge to share a tale of when you’ve experienced the same sort of situation. Hold back and only give advice when it’s asked for. It’s easily to offend people by accidentally implying they don’t know how to handle a situation.
9. Understand silences – and certainly don’t use any tiny pause to jump into the conversation. Some people use a short silence to collect their thoughts – it doesn’t necessarily mean they have finished, so give them a chance to continue.
10. When it’s your turn to speak, recap what they said with “so you’re saying…”. This shows you listened to everything they said – and that understanding them correctly is important to you.

— —

About the Author:

Andy Trainer works for Silicon Beach Training, leading providers of Project Management resources and courses, including PRINCE2.

We’re hiring a designer – check  out the full job description below:

The AgileZen team is seeking a full-time designer to join us in the Raleigh office of Rally Software. AgileZen is simple and easy-to-use project management software aimed at small teams across multiple markets.

We are a small, cross-functional team that collaborates heavily and works at a sustainable pace. Our emphasis is on teamwork and getting things done, while de-emphasizing scheduled meetings and meta-work. We value the quality of results over the content of your process, and the willingness to expand beyond your comfort zone. It also helps if you don’t take yourself too seriously.

AgileZen is a fast-growing software-as-a-service product that serves thousands of customers worldwide. We believe that design is a major differentiator, and value the experience of our users over all else.

The content of your portfolio is important, as is having a deep understanding of your own design aesthetic. You should be able to effectively communicate why you made the choices you made, and passionately discuss your opinion and expertise in a collaborative setting. Having skill at video games helps, too.

If you’re interested, please include a resume, link to your portfolio, and cover letter that blows us away and makes us really want to interview you.

Necessary Skills:
- A passion for beauty and usability
- Adobe CS (with vector graphic experience)
- Ability to create both wireframes and high-fidelity screens
- Knowledge of typography, layout, and color design principles
- Experience designing for the web

Extra Points Skills:
- Ability to prototype using HTML + CSS
- Experience designing for mobile and tablet interfaces
- Experience designing rich web interfaces
- Experience designing/documenting user flows and app architectures
- Experience designing responsive web design

Interested? Know someone who is? Drop me a note.

As of Monday, Rally Software’s Raleigh office has moved in to Pilot Mill – a historical cotton mill refurbished in to beautiful office space. Our new space is adorned with exposed brick, large windows, and a great outdoor space (visible in the photo below). Once the proverbial dust settles, we’ll show-off some additional pictures.