The Kendis Program Board is packed with features beyond just handling your teams, features/stories, dependencies and risks. It's designed to be a comprehensive tool for managing your entire process seamlessly.
Here are some of the key Planning Ceremonies available in Kendis:
These functionalities enable you to streamline and enhance your planning activities, making Kendis a central platform for all your planning needs.
1. Confidence Vote
Confidence Voting is a crucial part of your PI/Quarterly Planning process. Kendis simplifies participation in this ceremony, allowing anyone to join without needing a Kendis license.
The Kendis Board Administrator will prepare the Confidence Voting. When it's time to vote, they'll click the "Start Voting" button, enabling all users to participate. If you're an admin, you can find instructions on how to set up the Confidence Vote in Kendis by consulting the dedicated guide.
Joining Confidence Voting Session
Voting Results Explanation
Once the voting has ended, the results will be shown on the Voting Results screen.
For every team, the voting option with the most selections is displayed. For example, in the screenshot below, four members voted for PI#4, with two choosing "High Confidence." Therefore, "High Confidence" appears next to this team's row.
The notation "2/4" indicates that out of the total four votes, two were for "High Confidence."
If any vote is cast as "No confidence," a red icon will appear. However, if there are no "No confidence" votes for a team, the red icon will not be shown.
The average score is determined by taking the mean of all the votes cast.
A summary of the voting results is shown.
You may click the arrow icon to expand each Team to view the details.
2. Planning Agenda
Kendis offers a user-friendly, shareable Planning Agenda that allows for attaching presentation links and "Meeting Rooms" from various platforms, such as Zoom, MS Teams, or any other tool you're utilizing.
The Planning Agenda also displays locations and automatically adjusts the time to suit each location. If you're a Kendis Board admin, you can find a comprehensive guide on how to set up your PI Planning agenda here.
Example Planning Agenda
3. Planning SoS (Scrum of Scrums)
The Planning Scrum of Scrums, or Planning SoS, is a quick catch-up meeting where the RTE, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners come together to check on how PI Planning is going and tackle any issues teams might be facing.
The RTE or Kendis admin will set up the Planning SoS session and decide on the important questions for each meeting. Depending on your planning methods, you might have one or several of these sessions. If you're an admin or RTE, check out this setup guide.
If you're joining a Planning SoS, you'll need to respond to the questions prepared for the session. Here's how to do it:
Click "More Menu" on your Program Board and pick "Planning SoS."
For your team, choose answers to the questions. You can mark a question as "Blocked" if needed, and a special icon will appear next to your team and the question.
This makes it simpler for RTEs or admins to see and help with any issues you've flagged.
Here are some general features of Planning SoS sessions:
You have the ability to set up multiple sessions.
Each session can be scheduled with a specific date, time, and a link to a "Virtual Room" for online collaboration.
The first Planning SoS session comes pre-loaded with default questions, but you're free to modify these by adding, editing, or removing questions as needed.
There's a "Copy template" feature that allows you to reuse answers from previous sessions, streamlining the setup process.
You can easily track participation with a summary that shows how many teams have responded to the questions.
If a team encounters an issue and is "blocked," this will be highlighted with a red background and a blocked icon for quick identification and resolution.
4. Team Capacity
Team capacity is accessible via the More menu option and offers comprehensive management for your team capacities. You can
Set a default capacity value, which automatically applies when adding a new team member.
View a team-by-team capacity summary.
Customize capacity for individual users for each sprint.
When you set a team and sprint capacity in this section it will automatically be added to the Program Board.
Assign a location and role to team members, though these details are optional.
Include "Non-Kendis" users in the team capacity list. You can find them through your agile tool (like Jira or Azure DevOps) or add them manually by name and email. Importantly, adding Non-Kendis users doesn't use up your Kendis licenses.
Team Capacity Overview
You may go to the Program Board/Team Area and overwrite capacity for a team and sprint. More details to setup capacity manually is available at https://help.kendis.io/en/articles/3529824-how-to-set-team-capacity-for-sprints
5. Program Roles
This section provides a central place to define roles for your Program. These roles, once defined, will be used later in other sections, e.g., in the Scrum of Scrums section.
Other Reference Material