Planbox is proud to announce the release of a brand new feature: GitHub integration.
This feature lets you integrate Planbox with source control tools, and allows you to interconnect them through the use of issues.
With the GitHub integration you can now:
You can check out the documentation, and download our Chrome plugin.
Here is a preview of the feature:
Zendesk has done major changes in the last few months to their app, including the way they integrate with other apps. In consequence, we’ve updated and improved the Planbox integration with Zendesk, so that you can seamlessly use both applications together.
The old Planbox integration (known as the Planbox Widget) will continue to work in the Classic version of Zendesk, until Zendesk stops supporting its classic version. However, on the Planbox side, we’ve stopped updating the old widget, since we’ve launched the new Planbox App in the new Zendesk.
Once you switch to the new Zendesk, all your tickets previously linked with Planbox items will continue to function normally. no worries! So why wait? Switch to the new Zendesk now to starting using the integration with all the new functionalities.
If you are new to Zendesk, you will first need to create a Zendesk account for your organization. Once logged into your Zendesk account, you can install the Planbox app from the Zendesk Apps Marketplace located in the Manage Cog.
From your Planbox account, you will need to go to your initiative’s Manage Page. Under the Features section, make sure that you have the Zendesk integration enabled.
For detailed instructions, please consult the Zendesk Integration Support section.
Making sure that your customers get the best of your attention will help you create a delightful experience for them with your company. Zendesk is a online help desk application that will help you manage all that by shortening your response time, automating your workflows and providing you with reports.
Zendesk had already received a lot of love for their classic version, but last year, they made their application even more awesome by redesigning its interface. According to them, here’s why you should love the new Zendesk even more. It has:
If you are still using the classic version of Zendesk, you should seriously consider switching to their new version to benefit from the improved functionalities. If you are not convinced, read their FAQ here.
The redesigned Zendesk business integrations platform is where Planbox comes in. Whether you mainly work in Planbox or in Zendesk, with the integration, you can now manage your customers and your projects together.
If you used the old Planbox widget in the classic Zendesk, once you switch to the new interface, be sure to check out the new Planbox integration with Zendesk for even more functionalities. It is now available in the Zendesk app marketplace.
If you’re new to all this, simply activate the Zendesk integration with Planbox to start creating Planbox items from Zendesk tickets.
Planbox has been growing a lot in the past few months not only with the many new features we’ve released, but also with a constantly growing community of users! To accommodate to all this progress, we are dedicating a bit of time this weekend to make a few major improvements to our infrastructure.
These upgrades will be done in the back-end of Planbox, so you won’t really notice any differences. But! We like to keep you in the loop, so here’s in a nutshell what will happen. To make data security and redundancy even stronge,r and to continue with the reliability of our systems, we are upgrading software and hardware.
For all this to happen, please note that Planbox will not be available this coming Saturday night for up to 1 hour:
Saturday September 1st, 2012
from 9 PM to 10 PM Eastern Daylight Time
The following guest post is written by Greg Geracie, President of Actuation Consulting. Actuation Consulting is a leading provider of training and consulting for product managers and product teams. This post is tied to another post that Greg has done entitled; Product Development Methodology Statistics.
Agile methodologies have become a component of everyday conversation in the product development world. While widely adopted, confusion remains about what Agile really means and how to best utilize these methodologies. In fact, a recent study by the analyst group Voke indicates that half of the organizations that they surveyed did not have a consistent definition of what Agile actually means!
To be honest, this should not come as a surprise. While Agile has been around for quite some time organizations are still in the process of determining how to ideally utilize these powerful methodologies. While Agile has successfully planted itself into most organizations, there is more to this than meets the eye.
Actuation Consulting recently conducted a global survey of product team performance. The central result of the study was that we discovered five factors that, if effectively implemented, provide product teams a 67% chance of becoming high performing.
However, contained deeper within the study findings was another powerful set of facts related to the current use of different product development methodologies.
Survey respondents stated that approximately 13% of organizations were using “pure” Agile methodologies. “Pure” meaning that iterative incremental techniques were not being mixed with other methodologies. Surprisingly, 18% of organizations said they were “pure” Waterfall. More than you might have expected! Contrary to popular belief Waterfall is still alive and well.
At this point you might ask two questions. 1) How can Agile be so small a percentage? And 2) if Agile and Waterfall combined make up 31% – what method makes up the rest?
Good questions. Let’s take number two first.
The answer is “blended” methodologies. 53% of organizations state that they’re combining Agile and Waterfall together to address organizational challenges. They’re doing this in a variety of ways based upon the needs of the organization. Some are using Agile for new product development since it’s an effective way of hedging investment risk. Others are using Agile for “high value” product development projects. The variations are quite extensive.
So perhaps the best way to think about Agile’s reach is to combine the blended and “pure” Agile numbers together. Calculated this way 71% of organizations are using Agile to some degree – almost three-quarters.
As you might expect, pure Agile is skewed heavily toward earlier stage organizations. Pure Waterfall organizations tend to be larger in size and scale. However, the blended approach is consistent across all sizes!
There truly is more to Agile adoption than meets the eye!
Actuation Consulting and Planbox will be doing a webinar on this data and other relevant findings from the study, planned for the latter part of September. Stay tuned for dates and times.
We are very excited to show you the new things we’ve worked on in the past month in Planbox. We focused on 2 things:
Let us know what you think. Will you be using these new additions?
Improvements on the Items Board
The Actions dropdown menu has moved upwards. Have no fear, it’s still there! Moreover, you can now directly create items from Zendesk (optional feature) from this menu.
The Item Sorting Bar (ie, the column headers) is now permanently displayed at the top of your items! (If you don’t want it permanently there, you can hide it by going to the Actions menu.) We also added the Priority column (#) on the left side of your items; it’ll now be easier for you to see the priority of each item.
As previously, when you’re clicking around to sort items, that view is only local and temporary. Your team members will not see the changes unless you change the new priority for everyone in the team. Note that now, when a sort is active, items won’t be movable by drag and drop.
As for the filters, with the improved functionality, items can now be filtered even more specifically. This improvement makes the use of roles for tasks (optional feature) very relevant. For example, when a task is meant for a specific role but has not been assigned to anyone yet, applying the Role-Filter and the People Filter to Not-Assigned will allow anyone with that role to pick up the unassigned task.
Lastly, you can now just directly drag and drop files into individual Item Panes. You don’t even have to open up that File tab anymore!
What is the new Iteration Baseline Tile?
The Iteration Baseline Tile will show you items that have been added or changed since the iteration has been baselined. You will be able to compare the hours originally estimated for each item to the newly updated amounts. Ultimately, you get an overview of the work that was added since the iteration was originally planned, and if more resources will be needed.
To identify the modified items or the newly added ones in your list of items, look for the full brown triangles or the empty brown triangles at the corner of your items:
If the planning of your iteration suddenly changes a lot, you can choose to reset the baseline. By doing so, all newly added items and items with modified estimated hours will become part of the original items. In essence, it will be as if you were just starting your iteration and have planned everything before.
The Iteration Baseline tile is an optional feature. To activate this new feature, you need to go to your Initiative Settings and look in the Features section.
Future additions expected for the Iteration Baseline Tile: a section for items that have been removed from the iteration.
What’s next?
To give you a sneak preview, we’re working on making search within Planbox even more powerful.
Remember, we always love hearing from you. Planbox is what it is today because of all of you! So if you’d love a new feature or have a question, show that Feedback tile some looooove! Or… give us a call! 
This is the first in a series of guest posts by Brad Barton, Mark Ferraro, and Si Alhir, three transformation consultants with almost 75 years of combined experience coaching organizations with enterprise agility.
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Velocity is a core concept in the agile world. Velocity is a measure of a team’s “throughput” in a given timeframe (timebox, iteration, sprint, release, etc.).
For a collection of items a team is to deliver, the size of the items is estimated, the team’s throughput or velocity in delivering the items is measured (within a timeframe), and the duration the team is projected to deliver the items is derived. A team’s instantaneous velocity is its velocity for a given timeframe. A team’s average velocity is the average velocity over time (or multiple timeframes).
Velocity is not merely constant over time, but naturally fluctuates within some upper limit and lower limit, essentially, a velocity range, which can be represented using a control chart.
The range represents the degree of variation (of many “things”) within the team and around the team. A larger range indicates more variation and less predictability while a smaller range indicates less variation and more predictability. Exploring the causes of variation fosters a better understanding of how to reduce variation, increase predictability, and empowers the team to make more meaningful commitments to what it will deliver within a timebox.
Don’t overlook the power of using velocity ranges to hone your velocity!
We are once again very proud to announce that Planbox has been selected as a promising startup. Planbox and 19 other Canadian companies will be attending 48hrs in the Valley, an event organized by C100. C100 is a non-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment. Twice a year, they reward 20 Canadian small companies by sending them to a weekend in Silicon Valley, for workshops, mentorship, investor meetings, conferences, networking, and much more.
See this video to learn a bit more about C100.
48hrs in the Valley, happening from June 25 to 27 2012 in San Francisco, has invited the several speakers and mentors from the tech community to inspire these 20 Canadian companies. Among them, there are Gary Kovacs CEO of Mozilla, Paul Bernard VP Strategy and Business Development of Nokia, Rahim Fazal Co-Founder of Involver, Alex Mehr Co-Founder of Zoosk.com, and many more.
Gary Kovacs
Paul Bernard
Congratulations to all the other Canadian startups! Montreal is representing with 4 of them: Frank & Oak, HighScore House, Wall Street Survivor and us, Planbox.
We are proud to have Olivier Cabanes of Planbox, and Martin-Luc Archambault of Wajam, represent the family of Bolidea startups at the C2-MTL conference. Planbox is honoured to have been selected as a winner among the 315 startups that have applied to the Emerging Entrepreneurs Contest of C2-MTL, back in February. Sponsored by the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Foundation, the contest was launched to give the opportunity to 25 emerging entrepreneurs of Québec to attend the prestigious conference for free.
C2-MTL, a new international business conference integrating creativity and commerce, will be happening in the creative hotbed of Montreal, Canada from May 22 to 25, 2012. Business professionals from various industries will get to “explore creative answers to commercial questions” in The Village, a venue built especially for the occasion.
The Village of Innovation
Sid Lee, with partners Fast Company, Cirque du Soleil and HSM, has created this unique experience for the participants of C2-MTL to learn from and to discuss with high-profile speakers. All-stars such as Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette and Walt Disney Group’s former CEO Michael Eisner will change the history of presentations forever with interactive exhibitions, state-of-the art projections, collaborative workshops and much more.
Here’s a little preview of what’s in store for the lucky attendees of C2-MTL:
Congratulations to all the other entrepreneurs who have won!
All image credits to: C2-MTL
I often use this analogy when introducing new team members to certain methodology when working on various projects. Everyone seems to assume a role of ownership where they have expertise, yet the things no one knows about just kind of gets left behind until a Project Manager or some sort of authority figure points it out and asks for a volunteer or voluntells someone to handle it. To put this in perspective, if the project is a new web based service, then the developers quickly get to writing codes, the designers do their thing and the social butterflies get on with the marketing efforts, all quickly recognized by the other team members as bing sudo VP’s of whatever role they are doing.
But in a small team and you could even say small company, is this really the best approach? It does appear to be the quickest most logical way to succeed and in the end everyone can get recognition for their part.
But what if I, my friends studying bio mechanics and a market research analyst were tasked with building a rocket powerful enough to leave the earth’s atmosphere (100km+). Who then, would be the VP of propulsion? Who would be the VP of guidance systems? And how do we get to our goal? The answers over the years have included but are not limited to:
Let’s dissect these a bit.
Everyone’s answer is built and prepared for failure, to assume the worse and what’s surprising is they usually fire these out in rapid order without thinking too much. Meaning they are preconditioned this way by time and experience.
Substitute the rocket by a complex problem being handled by a team that does not have the required skills to handle it properly and you will get a scenario that reproduces itself countless times per day all over the corporate world. Look at the answers above and you will get a good idea of what is going through everyone’s mind when they initially hear that their team is being tasked with this project. Professional boundaries do not permit them to answer as blatantly as they do in my analogy questions, however they still have a significant amount of baggage framing their thoughts this way.
Radical approaches need to be taken to change these behaviors. New teams working on new projects may have an easier time changing where teams that have been together for years and sometimes decades might find it hard to even think this way. Success and failure for the project should lay with the team and not its individual members. It can all begin by substituting Accountable with Responsible (first definitions).
