"New Year, New Me" is a popular expression heard every New Year. The start of a New Year gives people the chance to work towards being a better version of themselves - and KaiNexus is no exception to this. KaiNexus is celebrating the New Year with major updates in 3.0, scheduled to come out Friday January 7th. After so much anticipation for 3.0, it's finally here! Check out some highlights below:

Here at KaiNexus, we take the continuous improvement practices that we preach to heart. We believe that every misstep and failure is an opportunity for improvement, and tackle those problems head on. We've had a couple of app outages this year that identified a hole in our communication plan, which, once revealed, was addressed by a cross-functional team. In this post, I want to share with you what happened, how we fixed it, and what the results were the next time we had an outage.

Whether you are still going strong or gave up in the first week of January, what's one thing that all of our New Year's resolutions have in common? They center around improvement! That’s why KaiNexus is starting off the new year with significant improvements in our 2.5 release:

2.4.9 is here with 24 improvements! Feel free to use that whole extra hour we got back (if you participate in Daylight Saving Time, that is) to check them out here:

Notifications

We have completely revamped the Notifications window! The notification window has never been easier to get your work done in as you can now expand your notification window to see a detailed view of your items.

Our development team is always working hard, but they have been outrageously busy over the last few weeks, bringing you 32 new features, improvements, and bug fixes. You can expect things to speed up even more from here, because we recently also added a new member to our development team! Please join us in welcoming the talented Jett Raines, who is quickly becoming known at KaiNexus for his great eye for design and flair for tropical shirts. You'll be able to meet him (and the rest of our great development team) at the 2017 KaiNexus User Conference in September!

Here are some of the highlights:

Our development team is always crazy busy. They’ve been hard at work in the past few weeks to bring you 16 new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here are some of the highlights:

Our development team has been hard at work, and even though it's only been 19 days since our last release, we couldn't hold this one back any longer! This KaiNexus update has an exciting, brand new feature, as well as some real time saving improvements making it easier to manage tasks and scale projects.

Keep reading for more details and links to the support articles!

Our development team has been hard at work in the past few weeks to bring you 19 new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here are some of the highlights:

Control Charts

With this latest version of KaiNexus, you can create even better control charts to monitor performance. The best part? You can set the chart generate an alert should the data become out of control. That way, you’ll never miss out on important information.

You can:

• Configure the lower, average, and/or upper limits and pick a color for each.
  
  
• Decide whether you want to have an alert sent to all members of the chart’s team if the data that is entered is out of control.
  
  
• Decide whether you want to make data point markers red if the point is out of control. Note that markers must also be enabled on the data series configuration.

So what happens when data is outside of the control limits? A red exclamation point will be displayed alongside the chart’s name on any list of charts. And if you enabled “Generate Flag,” every member of the chart’s team will get an alert.

KaiNexus is a handy platform because it doesn't force you to use any one methodology for your improvement work. As such, we have people using our system to support a wide variety of improvement work. One practice we see a lot is using KaiNexus to support improvement-related certification classes. 

I briefly touched on the Project Curve in a previous blog post, but this Report is so important that I felt it prudent to give you a more comprehensive explanation.

The Project Curve Report lets you assess the growth of your improvement over time by tracking the start and end rates of your organization’s Projects.

Typically, Improvements and Projects will have different traits. In most organizations, there will be fewer Projects than Improvements. It is also typical for Projects to take longer to be completed than it does Improvements. 

We have found that organizations that tie Projects directly to their strategic goals are often more successful than those that don’t. It also seems to be advantageous for your organization’s Projects to have a practical cycle time; if it takes too long for Projects to be completed, people may lose motivation.