How Enspirit uses Klaro Cards for software project tracking

Enspirit, despite being a relatively small team (currently less than 15 people), operates on numerous software projects simultaneously, dealing with various aspects for each project. The company also embraces a structural remote work setup, with team members spread across Europe, focusing on pair work, individual and collective coaching, and training.

Enspirit is a preferred partner of Klaro, serving as a technical service provider. It's no surprise that Klaro holds a significant place in their workflow, but not always where one might expect...

Before Klaro

There is no shortage of software for IT companies, and Enspirit has long used:

• Trello for simple IT projects with a small team (one to two developers at most).
• Jira for more significant technical projects.
• Redmine, historically, for bug tracking.
• GitHub and its Issues and Pull Requests for open-source libraries.

Challenges

Over time, several difficulties arose in the daily use of these software tools:

• Difficulty involving clients (e.g., in Jira), as prioritizing ideas, features, and bug resolution requires excellent communication with clients and end-users.
• Inability to use Trello for large-scale projects: too many tickets, inflexibility in the tagging system, no dedicated view per person, etc.
• Inadequacy of these tools for a team working on multiple projects, each with specific processes and focus.
• The need to use other tools for less technical tracking: documentation, training and reading lists, ideas, and open-source library tracking, etc.

How Klaro is Used

Klaro was introduced in 2018, initially to align product ownership with clients. The software gradually became integrated into the entire company:

• On the development side, each software project has a dedicated Klaro Project. A specific configuration of dimensions and boards is favored, rather than reusing a rigid template, as each project tends to be different. Client requests are encoded as Klaro Cards to track Bugs and User Stories (new features). After prioritization with clients and users, these cards are distributed within the team, which mostly follows a Kanban methodology without sprint organization.
• Klaro projects are used to track "common" elements: infrastructure, open-source libraries, documentation, training, etc. Each project is configured specifically to have relevant information at the right time.
• On the consulting side, creating Klaro projects is common to assist with coaching or advising the client or their team. Whether establishing a GDPR registry, tracking ideas, brainstorming with the team, or mapping risks.

Results and Key Features

Klaro has delivered the following results:

• The introduction of Klaro significantly improved client project tracking, especially for sorting and prioritizing ideas.
• Klaro has helped establish a lasting lean and agile culture within the company and among clients. By aiding in structuring and tracking work and initiating important discussions about the business value of ideas and managing their complexity, Enspirit has seen best practices embedded in teams, ultimately reducing the necessary digital tracking workload.

Key features of Klaro:

• The flexibility of Klaro's dimensions and filters, allowing each project and team to make their tracking choices based on project relevance rather than a rigid or overly theoretical standard.
• The ability for a board to display a subset of cards, presented in a specific way to achieve a particular goal.
• Cards automatically move from one board to another when their dimensions change, enabling real-time automated communication between team members and between the team and the external world.