Best of KANBAN Tools

Had been busy exploring good tools available on "Kanban" and yes i ve got a list of around 14 of them. Although most of you are aware what Kanban means lets just revise in two lines......

Kanban, also spelled kamban and literally meaning "signboard" or "billboard", is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. According to Taiichi Ohno, the man credited with developing Just-in-time, kanban is one means through which JIT is achieved. Kanban is not an inventory control system. Rather, it is a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

You can refer to a quick and very interesting listing at http://www.toolsjournal.com/tools-world/item/142-kanban-tools howevere here comes a quick listing of all Kanban tools available today. There are few more coming up and in beta version and hope to get chance to review them in few days.

Top 14 Kanban Tools:

• TargetProcess
• Hansoft
• Kanbanery
• AgileZen
• KanbanTool
• flow
• SmartQ
• LeanKit Kanban
• KanbanPad
• SilverCatalyst
• Simple-Kanban
• TRICHORD
• JAM Circle
• Lino

Please do post your comments on your experiences on above tools if you used them or feel free to let me know on any good missing tools from the list.

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7 Free Open Source CRM Tools

Talk about CRM tools and people talk much about Free CRM, SaleForce, ZOHO and other well known tools. Undoubtedly they may be or probably are superior tools, however in essence all these tools are ofcourse free but limited by either number of users/licenses or restricted functionality.

However i was trying to see if i can have a CRM for my own use which exposes all the functionality, provides me extensibility which is open source and also comes with good community support. Surprised to see there are not many out there. I could however list 7 of them which were more relevant to what i am looking for and am sure will meet most of the small to medium businesses needs operating on low budgets.

• CiviCRM
• openCRX
• opentaps
• hipergate
• vtiger
• PMAM CRM
• Fat Free CRM

For more details on above tools/features/downloads/URLs please refer to

http://toolsjournal.com/tools-world/item/141-top-free-crm-tools

Will be soon (next 2 weeks) listing all CRM tools available in the market as part of our efforts to share knoweldge on software tools through ToolsJournal.

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What Agile Tool and How to Choose

Many a times i come across organizations selecting an agile tool with no buy in from people who are going to use it. Sounds familiar isnt it? While doing some research on agile tools available in the market almost close to 80 of them, trust me when i say everyone whom i interviewed informally on the agile tools known to them or came across so far working in IT, at the max people knew only 3 to 4 tools available in the market.

I would like to, through this blog post send a message that its not just one or two known tools but the tool supplier community have created incredible and over 80 tools which are having their own specialities. Please feel free to browse through all the agile tools available at http://toolsjournal.com/agile-management-tools

I realized it is indeed a wonderful idea to not only list the tools but also do what we can at toolsjournal.com to address the problem of what to consider while selecting an agile tool. The result is a simple write up on my experience choosing a tool for my own use. Please feel free to read this at

http://www.toolsjournal.com/tools-world/item/131-how-do-i-decide-which-agile-tool-suits-my-organization

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Cloud Computing Predictions

Recently i have tried to write an article on Cloud Computing while i was more or less learning about it. Article did turn out good like a very good beginners guide. Below is a section of the article as to what i predict to happen w.r.t Cloud Computing in 2011.

View my article on Cloud at http://bit.ly/hXRkVG and "10 Steps to move to cloud" at http://bit.ly/e900YO

Predictions on Cloud Computing for 2011

• Cost savings will take an upper hand over Security Concerns thereby preferring public cloud over private cloud. I also would like to back up this prediction by the fact that "Security Concerns" always remained as "Concerns" however in practice so far there had been minimal or dare i say no reported case of breach of security (i mean critical breaches). It will be impossible for any CTO to ignore the weight of advantages of public cloud compared to private. In other words "Security" will remain a concern but no longer a barrier in cloud computing.
• Networking bandwidth to become the bigger concern and hence extra focus on distributed data centres and disaster recovery by established cloud vendors like google, amazon, salesforce, microsoft. Additional data centers will bring the cloud near to the organizations and also help distributed bandwidth. You ll probably see more screams on outages.
• A good time will be spent by industry in understanding their infrastructure, legacy systems, application base and how they transform them to cloud with robust risk management. So far everybody has been happy talking about cloud computing but guess 2011 is going to see getting real and equipping themselves to changing world. CEO's/CTO's will urge what it means to the organizations in terms of dollars realistically.
• 2011 will be an year of major successes, failures, learnings in cloud computing world for many organizations. This might be an year where industry realizes the next generation processes within IT Security, Service Management, Delivery, Budgeting and enable much more matured cloud computing by end of the year.
• "InterCloud" will still most likely be a concept and will atleast take a year or more to become a reality in true sense

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Social Media Strategy..........How Do I Do It?

I got exposed to wild life of Social Media recently and really could not believe its huge presence in our daily business and personal lives. Coming from a bit of management background i firmly believe, planning is critical for anything to work. "Social Media" and without a plan your business is all set for failure atleast these days.

I did interview few on how they are going about getting social and its quite practical to see most of them are going with out a plan. Admittedly i did the same thing as well, well with a very basic idea of what i need to do. However soon realized that without a social media plan or strategy you are not going to gain anything in this space. 

Here are my learnings over a period of 1 month in Nov/Dec 2010. I also have written an article of all my learnings which i am as we speak am implementing and seeing results slowly but steadily.

http://www.toolsjournal.com/business-domains-and-analysis/item/127-social-media-planhow-do-i-create-one

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