Get your work organised Kanban style!

I've been really looking forward to working with Kudos Boards, a visual, personalised and intuitive display of IBM Connections Activities. The past months I've tested the pre-releases, and on June 11th there was the announcement that Kudos Boards is now ready to go!

Kudos Boards offers Activities users a better way of getting your work organised.

Kanban style

I like the Kanban board style presentation of IBM Connections Activities. A Kanban board is used quite frequently in projects, but can be usefull for other purposes as well. The Kanban board shows steps in a process or list visually as cards.













There are some key principles for a Kanban Board:

• Visualize workflow
  Cards make the workflow clearer.
• Limit work-in-progress
  Visualisation and workflow immediately shows what still needs to be done, thus gets done !
• Pull work from column to column
  Easily drag and drop cards to move tasks through the workflow process.

 

 

Kudos Boards 'fixes' some issues with Activities

• Long lists of Activities
  When employees are using a lot of Activities, it gets hard to track which ones are most important. The only options you have to view your list, is by date or by priority. No personal views or ways to sort.
• Content in Activities can become very long lists|
  Often all the content in an Activity doesn't fit on the page, and it is hard to see all the content at a glance.
• Adding or editing content requires a lot of clicking
  To add an entry or todo, or to edit one, takes a few clicks, and content requires a lot of room.
• Moving sections, entries or Todo's can be hard
  When using drag-and-drop employees need to have a very steady hand, and even then, moving can go terribly wrong!
• Real-time views not possible
  Content edited/added by multiple employees working in an Activity at the same time isn't  displayed instantly. Employees need to refresh the page first before changes made by others are visible to all.
• No way of drilling down to specific content in an Activity
  Sometimes you don't want to see all the content in an Activity, but just some that is relevant to you, or to you at a certain time or in a specific context. Activity content can not be filtered in any way.

 

What do Kanban Boards offer?

When you use the Kanban Boards view in IBM Conenctions Activities you get a much more visual way of working. Visualization is more than just another look&feel. It actually helps you recognizing things, allowing you to get to what you need faster, and easier.
It's not just another way of displaying Activities. On top of the visual display come some new features: Board categories and color coding, which in turn allow you to filter your Activities list or content in an Activity. Using Board categories and filters makes it possible to view the Activity much more to your personal preferences.

Some great advantages of Kudos Boards

Activities overview
When viewing you Boards, instead of Activities list:

• Visual display of your Activities as tiles.
• Tile colors to visually display different types of Activities.
• Board categories to categorize Activities. Allowing you to filter your Activities by a category.
• Pin Boards, and easily view your pinned boards (like favourites).

Within a specific Activity

• Simply drag-and-drop cards, which moves them through sections, or within a section.
• One-click editing of the Board settings. No more searching through Activity menus.
• One-click editing of entries or todos, in a visual info card that easliy fits the screen.
• One-click to add a new entry or todo.
• Card colors to  categorize entries and todos , allowing you to filter on specific colors.
• Filter Lists. A list is the same as a section, and with Kudos Boards you can filter to display specific sections (lists) only.
• Real-time work in progress! Boards are synced automatically. Showing other people's work instantly!

I've worked with Kudos Boards for a while now, and I really love them!
I've also created some Activities / Kudos Boards templates that will help organisations get going fast:

• Meeting
• Sales pipeline
• Product development
• Organising an event
• Creating a newsletter
• Personal Getting Things Done system
• Pomodori technique

All templates work on IBM Connections Activities, but really come to live with Kudos Boards, using the visual tiles and cards display, the color categories and Board categories, and filtering options.


View the extensive demo by Adam Brown on Youtube:

Make it personal: Give Thanks with Kudos Thanks

I have been a huge enthusiast for applying gamification in the social software for the enterprise arena, and today I got even more thrilled. Our administrator just finished installing Kudos 1.4 on our Connections environment.

Human interaction: Give Thanks

With this next version of Kudos, which was recently released, it is now possible to add some human interaction. Previous versions were mainly measuring activities and behaviour through defined metrics and rewarding them with points and badges. Kudos Thanks lets you interact with a colleague by showing them your appreciation. You may give any of your colleagues your Thanks through some peer-to-peer badges.

What this means is that aside from the machine doing some rewarding through metrcis, you may now be rewarded personally by one of your colleagues. it is more intuative, not based on any metrics.

Build a culture of trust

We all like to get thanks. Kudos Thanks can help organisations to change their culture into a more openly and appreciative one. Many times I come across organisations where saying thanks is not the most common thing in the world. Showing your appreciation for good work done, though, is crucial for social software. To dare to share by collaborating more openly there needs to be a culture of trust. Appreciation for ones transparency and public sharing will build this trust.

Employee of the month

One of the Kudos Thanks Badges is the 'Employee of the month' Badge. At many organisations there is already such a thing. The employee of the month may be put out on a poster or a billboard, or be announced at a group event. Now that appreciation van be displayed in Kudos as well. I changed the settings for this badge so that it can only be awarded by a specified group: management. It's very easy to create a group, just add the names from the addressbook type-ahead.

For any of the Kudos Thanks badges you may specify which group can award them, and how often it can be awarded. This makes it possible to design very targeted Thanks Badges. You may want to design one specifically aimed at rewarding the top sales person of the month. You could set that one to be awarded only by the sales director.

How to give Thanks?

From your Profile page there are two ways to give thanks:

• Go to the ThanksSummary widget and click on Thank Someone
• Go to the Kudos Thanks tab

From the left box you can select whom you want to give thanks to, what kind of badge you want to give, and write your personal message as to why.

Give Thanks using Kudos Thanks

Gamification for social software serious business

Now that social software usage is taking a giant leap, and focus on adoption is becoming key, gamification is becoming mainstream too.

Social software is becoming more and more mainstream in the enterprise. Along with the rise of social software I also see a rise in the recognition of the importance of user adoption. During events in the recent past, such as Social Connections III in Dublin and the Social Business Convention in Rotterdam, this became very obvious as almost every presentation (even the ones that didn't have it as its main subject) somewhat mentioned user adoption. It seems the days of 'build it and they will come' are definately over.

According to the IDC research study Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012-2016 Forecast companies will invest 42.4% more each year on enterprise social collaboration software. In 2011 the revenue from this category was US$ 0,77 billion and by 2016 this will be a soaring US$ 4,5 billion. According to this study, IBM Connections is the number one social software platform (US$ 105,4 million revenue).

At the same time gamification has entered the enterprise arena and is quickly becoming more accepted. Until 2011 gamification was mostly seen in business to consumer applications. But since 2011 gamification has become more widespread in combination with social software for the enterprise.

For IBM Connections there are now several vendors that integrate gamification. Bunchball, a long-time gamification solution provider, added support for IBM Connections with Level Up back in february 2012. Since june 2012 Badgeville introduced a connector to leverage their gamification engine to IBM Connections. ISW recently released their new version of Kudos, which introduces peer-to-peer badges (Thank You). And last week yet another player entered the arena - The Hive - which got an interview with Chris Miller on IDoNotes episode 126 Tembo Social interview. Apparently there is a huge demand for gamification to leverage user adoption of social software, for them to emerge.

It’s not enough to just provide a social software tool and expect your employees to start sharing knowledge and collaborating in a more open, transparent manner. A social platform itself does not change the routines and attitude/behaviour of employees. They must be stimulated to start using the tool, to learn more of it's features and to become more engaged. Gamification does just that.

It seems that the time is ripe. All three components seem to come together and are a perfect fit: growth of social software, general agreement on the importance of user adoption and gamification for social software as a means to accomplish that.