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Releases: theliberators/columinity.docs

February 8 - Quick setup & landing sites

08 Feb 14:11
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We used this iteration to lower the effort for teams to try and repeat Columinity with their teams.

"Quick setup" available in setup and repeat flows for new and existing teams

Several months ago, we released a new and more extensive flow for setting up new teams and customizing the survey. Since then, many teams have successfully used it. However, we also observed that teams sometimes found the setup process (with eight steps) a bit too lengthy, as they just wanted to access the survey and results as quickly as possible.

To this end, we have added a new "Quick setup" to the wizards to set up new teams/surveys and repeat scans:
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The "Quick setup" removes four steps from the flow and effectively lets us choose optimal settings for you. Specifically, the following steps are skipped in this flow:

  • The specification of an improvement goal
  • Topic customization for the survey
  • Personalization of the invitation message to participants
  • Letting us invite team members, stakeholders, and supporters for you

The "Quick setup"-flow reduces the number of decisions new teams need to make, thus making it easier just to get started. A screenshot of the quick flow (with its four remaining steps) is shown below:

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Quick setup for pre-specified model

Because Columinity supports multiple scientific models, we want to make it easier for teams to start with a specific model. So, it is now possible to provide setup links to new teams that already include the selected model, removing that step from the flow.

Landing sites for our scientific models

With the growing number of scientific models in Columinity, we want to ensure that teams can learn about our tool and the models we support. To make this easier, we launched four landing sites this week, providing more focused information for each model and allowing teams to get started quickly.

We hope these will help in bringing more diverse teams into Columinity.

Other improvements

  • 🐞 Resolved minor styling issues in the questionnaire. Specifically, the margin below H4 elements was increased to make it easier on the eyes.
  • 💹 Added Service Status links to Wiki and to website. By the way, we are proud of the 100% uptime over the past 90 days.
  • 💹 Resolved minor textual issues on the Columinity website. We also accidentally switched the sections C and D (under "Try Now").

January 31 - Introducing "Agile Mindset" model & tag-based filtering in the Coaching Center

30 Jan 16:05
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Starting this iteration, you can apply our new "Agile Mindset"-model to your team. This model was developed in close collaboration with Dr. Karen Eilers.

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Try it now with your team

You can try it out in several ways:

  • New team: Go to http://questionnaire.columinity.com/initiate/model/agilemindset to set up and diagnose a new team with the "Agile Mindset"-model.
  • Existing team (free plan): Locate your most recent Team Report and click "Repeat" to start a new scan. Select the "Agile Mindset"-model in the wizard.
  • Existing team (paid plan): In addition to the previous bullet, it is also possible to start new snapshots from the Teams Dashboard. Select "Agile Mindset" in the model selector. Then, create a new snapshot for this model for the desired teams.

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Why an "Agile Mindset" model?

If you've worked with Agile for a while, you've probably encountered situations where it worked well and situations where it didn't take off at all. Some teams and organizations seem to intuitively understand it, whereas others struggle to see the point of it all. An important factor that has been identified in scientific research (see below) is the notion of an "Agile mindset". This is a set of shared beliefs that encourage agility as a strategic asset, divided into four areas:

  • Customer co-creation: the extent to which team members value engaging with their customers directly and ensuring their work benefits them. This provides an essential source of feedback for organizations to learn about market dynamics and gain/keep a competitive advantage.
  • Empowered self-guidance: the extent to which team members positively value reflecting on themselves and their work processes, how they organize themselves, and how they take responsibility for their work.
  • Learning spirit: the extent to which team members evaluate their openness and actively seek out new skills, ideas, and views regarding their work in a complex (VUCA) environment. Failures and knowledge gaps are opportunities to learn new ways of working.
  • Collaborative exchange: the extent to which team members positively value transparent work and sharing knowledge to solve problems by exchanging information and ideas with others.

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An "Agile Mindset" forms both in teams and organizations, but only when the proper conditions are met. We identify three groups of core criteria based on research (note that these are still hypotheses):

  • Knowledge impulses: The presence of sufficient opportunities for teams to acquire new insights or skills. For example, training, conferences, or exchanges with a network.
  • Work design: Work has to be designed in a way that supports agility, meaning there is a focus on value (through goals, roadmaps, etc), and teams have sufficient autonomy and skills.
  • Leadership: People in leadership positions have to both model the behavior and beliefs that reflect an "Agile Mindset" and work to create the proper environments for teams to develop for themselves.

The introduction of this model provides a powerful new perspective on your teams through Columinity. It opens opportunities for new conversations and new improvement actions. Karen Eilers and Christiaan Verwijs have spent two weeks writing extensive evidence-based feedback to help guide your team.

ℹ️ Tip: This model is marked "beta". This means that we are in the process of validating this model with empirical data. Each model typically goes through several stages of validation. Because the model is in "beta", the factors and paths may change to reflect the data. We hope to reach a sufficient sample of teams (~200) soon to perform the first validation.

A scientific primer on the Agile Mindset model

An Agile Mindset reflects a set of shared beliefs and intentions that encourage agility. While the agile mindset is often perceived as a buzzword, Peters et al. (2020) identified a dimensional structure and uncovered a shared understanding of this concept. Their findings were further explored and confirmed by Eilers, Peters & Leimester, 2022 and Augner & Schermuly (2024).

Several studies highlight the importance of an agile mindset for the successful implementation of agile methods (e.g. Senapathi & Drury-Grogan, 2017; Könnölä et al., 2016) and digital tools within organizations (e.g. Shahalei & Kazan, 2020). Moreover, the agile mindset is gaining increasing attention in research related to education and training (e.g. Babik, 2022), as well as in the field of leadership (e.g. Salvetti & Bertagni, 2020). In a quantitative study, Eilers et al. (2022) demonstrated that an agile mindset positively influences organizational agility, which in turn enhances overall organizational performance. Furthermore, Augner & Schermuly (2024) provide evidence that applying an agile mindset fosters more innovative task behavior and reduces emotional exhaustion.

New: Filter results in the Coaching Center by team tags

This features will be released to production on the weekend of February 1/2

In this iteration, we also introduce the possibility of filtering the results in the Coaching Center ("Enterprise"-plan) by team tags. This feature was a common request from some of our "Enterprise" customers to allow analyses across organizations. Like the Teams Dashboard, you can now select a team filter in the header of the Coaching Center. The page then reloads to show you the results for only those teams matching the selected tags (OR, not AND):

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Thank you, Michael, Anna Sophia, Christina, and others, for suggesting this feature!

Other improvements

These improvements will be released to production on the weekend of February 1/2

  • 🐞 One question for the scale "Sprint Review Quality" was missing proper loadings on two options (2 and 3) of the Likert scale. This has been corrected. Consequently, the "Sprint Review Quality" score may be a little lower (around .1). Additionally, automated tests have been added to identify similar issues in the future.
  • 🐞The progress bar in the questionnaire exceeded 100% for scenarios where many questions were prefilled already. This is now corrected. Thank you to Karen Eilers for reporting it.
  • 💹 Factors that are measured for one model (say "Teamwork Quality") are now also included in the analyses for other models that also use it. For example, "Shared Learning" occurs in both the "Agile Mindset"-model and in the "Agile/Scrum Team Effectiveness"-model. Before this iteration, you had to measure "Shared Learning" twice to get a result in either model. But now, we combine this intelligently to use more data in the overall analyses. If you have teams that used both models, the results may change slightly as a result of having more data available for the analyses (which is a good thing).
  • 💹 Improved the highlighting of definitions in the questionnaire. Before this change, the word "team" in "teamwork" was also underlined to provide a definition for "team". This looked a little messy, so we now only highlight the occurrence of "team" or "teams". Additionally, the same term is now only defined once per question.

January 25, 2025 - Support for upgrading and downgrading subscription plans

27 Jan 14:41
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In this iteration, we worked on two big features. The first is the new "Agile Mindset" model that will be revealed fully next week (see sneak peek below). The second is the ability to upgrade and downgrade subscriptions.

Upgrade and downgrade subscriptions

In this iteration, we made it possible to change your subscription plan from monthly to annual, from professional to enterprise, and vice versa. This gives more flexibility to your plan.

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When a subscription is upgraded from "Professional" to "Enterprise":

  • Your existing Teams Dashboard and all its team remain available;
  • A Coaching Center is created for your new subscription;
  • The administrative account created for your "Professional"-plan is upgraded with additional permissions.
  • You receive onboarding information on how to get started;

When a subscription is downgraded from "Enterprise" to "Professional":

  • Your Coaching Center is removed. This means you now effectively have a single Teams Dashboard again (for one organization);
  • The first organization that was added to the Coaching Center is retained and reverted to the "Professional"-plan. Any other organizations are disconnected and effectively become unavailable. So if you had 5 organizations in your Coaching Center, only the first will remain available;
  • All "Coach" accounts are downgraded to regular users with access to your remaining Teams Dashboard;
  • You receive a confirmation by email.

Note that a downgrade results in the removal of features and data from your plan. After a month or so, we purge disconnected organizations from our systems to adhere to European privacy laws. So if you wish to retain another organization instead of the one selected, please get in touch with us at your earliest opportunity.

Other improvements

💹 Updated all remaining client-facing applications to Angular 19
🐞 Resolved a bug in the import of payouts from Stripe into our accounting software
🐞 The "Resume" box in the questionnaire wasn't properly centered in very wide screens. It is now.

Sneak Peek: Agile Mindset model

We are introducing a new scientific model to Columinity with Karen Eilers. A team is said to have an "Agile mindset" when members see clear value in co-creating with customers, continuous learning, empowered self-guidance, and collaboration. This model allows you to measure the extent to which your team exhibits such values and the extent to which the organization provides the proper conditions for such a mindset to grow and prosper.

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The model also identifies three variables to measure the preconditions for an Agile mindset: knowledge impulses, work design, and leadership. Taken together, this gives teams and organizations another powerful diagnostic to identify improvements.

Note: This model is in beta. While the Agile mindset has been validated as a construct already, the rest of the model is still a hypothesis. We will use data from Columinity to validate and improve the model.

🤝 Join our meetups to learn more about Columinity 🤝

Together with The Liberators, we are hosting a series of meetups where our customers share their experiences using Columinity. This is a great opportunity to hear practical and powerful examples of how Columinity can help drive systemic improvement - beyond frameworks and methodologies:

Join here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/the-liberators-15531047602

January 19, 2025 - UI improvements for Questionnaire, better Wiki integration

19 Jan 11:13
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In this iteration, we've begun working on a third scientific model to diagnose your teams. This model will provide another perspective on how your teams function and generate much-needed data to drive more scientific research - so we're very excited. If all goes well, we hope to release a beta of this model in the next iteration - so stay tuned for more.

In the meantime, we've also released a few minor improvements.

User experience improvements in questionnaire setup

This week, we've used your feedback to improve the flow of setting up a new questionnaire or a repeat questionnaire:

👉 We now provide a default invitation to your team that covers all the bases we feel it should cover.
👉 Improved how we show certain fonts, which makes the pages look cleaner (thank you, Wim Wouters).
👉 Improved language in the topic selector.
👉 The participation goal in the "Invite" step now more clearly signals that we're looking for a number.
🐞 Resolved a bug in the invites page that occur sometimes.

Added more links to Wiki resources

The previous iteration saw the release of a greatly updated and expanded Wiki. We spent some time in this iteration to make sure that the Wiki is referenced in more places, so that people can find support there when they need it:

👉 Links to step-by-step guides in the Wiki are now included in onboarding emails
👉 Added a documentation section to the Columinity.com website, which leads to the Wiki.
👉 Added the Wiki to relevant pages and to the "Getting Started" facilitation guide.

Other improvements

💹 Removed old code for joining snapshots. We use a different approach for this since November 2024, but wanted to retain the old code as a fallback scenario until the new year to catch any invitees who were still invited through the old approach.
💹 Began updating to Angular 19 (from 18). We do this project by project, beginning with the questionnaire, team report, and team dashboard.

🤝 Join our meetups to learn more about Columinity 🤝

Together with The Liberators, we are hosting a series of meetups where our customers share their experiences using Columinity. This is a great opportunity to hear practical and powerful examples of how Columinity can help drive systemic improvement - beyond frameworks and methodologies:

Join here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/the-liberators-15531047602

January 10, 2025 - Improved Wiki

10 Jan 13:41
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🎇 Happy 2025! 🎇

We welcome this new year with a much improved Wiki for Columinity. The new Wiki is better organized, has better navigation, and covers many more features not covered before. We have also written step-by-step guides for new teams, existing teams, the Teams Dashboard and the Coaching Center.

This new Wiki will help our growing base of customers get the most out of Columinity in the new year. If you find the Wiki lacks certain features, please inform us at info@columinity.com, and we will update it.

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What's next?

🔍 Develop team-level measures for Agile Mindset with Dr. Karen Eilers and include them in Columinity.
🔍 Include Wiki links on relevant places in Columinity
🔍 Implement Action Research flow for teams that have done a scan with their team

🏆 Don't miss our Happy 2025 Discount 🏆

Until January 15, you can also benefit from a sweet 25% discount on your first annual subscription for at least 1 team. Use the coupon HAPPY2025. Subscribe now at https://subscriptions.columinity.com. This promotion can't be combined with other promotions or discounts.

Other improvements

🐞 Resolved two OWASP issues (false alarm).
🐞 API access (as a feature) is now inherited properly for all Teams Dashboards under a Coaching Center.
💹 Columinity.com now has a section for Documentation, which leads to the new Wiki.
💹 Scanned all Docker images for vulnerabilities. Found none. Updated IronPDF to the latest version.
💹 Implemented new Currency Converter logic.

December 20, 2024 - API (Beta)

18 Dec 15:34
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This release will go live on the weekend of December 21/22

We are making it easier for selected customers on our "Enterprise"-plan to integrate Columinity into their ecosystem. This is our final release for this year, as we will take two weeks off to celebrate the holidays and welcome 2025. To those celebrating Christmas, 🎄Merry Christmas🎄 , and Happy Holidays if you celebrate other events. 🎇 See you in 2025 🎇

Columinity API

We've spent the past two iterations on a public API (Application Programming Interface) to perform basic tasks programmatically. A "Getting Started"-guide is available here.

The API is based on REST and uses OAuth for authentication. Users authenticate with a per-user pair of ConsumerKey/ConsumerSecrets, which allows us to provide fine-grained control and security.

At this moment, the API allows a user to:

  • Create, update, archive, or delete teams they have access to
  • Create, update, or delete organization users (those with access to one Teams Dashboard)
  • Create, update, or delete coaches (those with access to a Coaching Center and underlying Teams Dashboards)
  • Retrieve coaching centers, teams dashboards, and models available to a user

Complete documentation of our endpoints is available here.

Our public API is only accessible to users meeting the following criteria:

  • Their organization has an "Enterprise" plan
  • Their organization has asked permission to use the beta API (it is not available by default)
  • The user has administrative access to a Coaching Center

If you meet these criteria, you can find a button to request API tokens for your account in your user profile ("My Account > User profile").

Other improvements

🐞 Bug: The starting page of the questionnaire wasn't correctly aligned to the center of the page. Resolved.
💹 Improvement: A lot of code was refactored and simplified in how we query our API.
💹 Improvement: We now handle Demo users differently. Consequently, more accounts can be marked as "Demo" (making them read-only)

December 8, 2024 - Team meta data and small improvements

09 Dec 08:36
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In this iteration, we have begun work on a simple external API that selected customers can use to integrate Columinity into their ecosystem. The API aims to simplify the management of teams and users and export team-level (anonymized) results for internal analyses. If we can make a clear business case for it, the API may be expanded further in the future. If your company is interested in integrating Columinity, please contact us.

Teams can now set metadata

Up to 3 metadata fields can now be set for each team. This metadata is included in the export of team summaries (.csv) and will be exposed through the API. Metadata is helpful to store information with teams that is not used by Columinity but is needed for proper integration with your internal systems. For example, a metadata field could be used to hold the internal identifier of a team.

Team metadata can be set in the Teams Dashboard:
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(Empty) external API

We released a rudimentary external API. This API does not yet expose any endpoints. But it allowed us to set up and configure the release pipeline so we can more quickly iterate in the coming weeks.

Other improvements

🐞 Bug: The setup and repeat flow in the questionnaire did not always use the full width of the screen on smaller devices. This is now resolved, which makes the experience more consistent across steps in the wizards.
🐞 Bug: The "Invite" step in the setup and repeat flow sometimes started throwing errors ("Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'filter'") when invitees were added, then removed, and then added again. This issue is resolved. Thank you Asahata from reporting this.
🐞 Bug: New teams created through the setup flow did not yet get a team report generated for them immediately, but only on the first load of the team report. This is now resolved.
💹 Improvement: In Columinity, we always want to perform write operations asynchronously (through a message bus) and read operations synchronously (through a REST API). This allows us to scale more easily. The questionnaire still featured four write operations that were run synchronously because the user's experience in the UI also has to be consecutive and synchronous. We've improved this code to also use asynchronous calls, but with an RPC-style approach to allow it to appear synchronous.
💹 Improvement: Harmonized the commands we use to create teams across different microservices.
💹 Improvement: Bots from Google and other search engines were generating a lot of errors in our new setup and repeat flows. We have now disabled the bots and the errors.
🔒 Security: Upgraded all occurances of System.Text.Json to the latest version to resolve CVE-2024-43485

December 1, 2025 - Improved topic selection

29 Nov 09:56
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This release will be released on December 1

In this iteration, we worked to improve topic selection. The new topic selector is more user-friendly and makes selecting and unselecting topics easier. It also paves the way for future features we have in mind around topic selection.

New Topic Selector

The new topic selector more clearly shows the duration for each group (team members, stakeholders and supporters)
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It also allows you to see (or modify) the selected topics:
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Other improvements

🐞 Bug: Resolved issue that made clearing the notification email address for a team impossible in the Teams Dashboard. Thank you to Simon M for notifying us of this.
🐞 Bug: For branded environments, the "Learn more about [PlatformName]" at the start of the questionnaire now leads to the Company URL specified under "Branding" in the Coaching Center.
💹 Improvement: The URL to initiate a new scan for a team (i.e. from the Team Report or the reminder email) now uses a secure token instead of the TeamKey directly. This prevents scenarios where someone can initiate re-scans for other teams (provided they now their Key).
💹 Improvement: The descriptions of several factors have been improved to clarify more clearly what they measure. Thank you to Christina M. for recommending this.
💹 Improvement: The "Personalize" step in the setup/repeat flow now makes suggestions on what to add in the invitation.
💹 Improvement: Added Dr. Karen Eilers to the Columinity research team at columinity.com.
💹 Improvement: Added Wiki page that describes various statistical pitfalls that you have to look out for when interpreting data. Christina M recommended this - thanks!

November 25 - Improved flow to invite your team, stakeholders and supporters and to set reminders

20 Nov 18:02
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This release will be available from November 25 and onward.

In this iteration, we are making it easier to invite your team, stakeholders, and supporters. Our current product goal is to help teams apply evidence-based thinking to their continued improvements ("action research"). One part of this is to reduce barriers to scan and re-scan your team frequently.

Inviting your team, stakeholders, and supporters is now easier

In the flow to set up a new survey for your team or to repeat a diagnostic, you can now provide email addresses of people to invite. Columinity will then invite them for you. This step is entirely optional; you can always (also) use the invitation links that we already offer.

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If you have access to the Teams Dashboard (Professional and Enterprise plans), any invitees for the new snapshot will also appear there. From there, you can invite more participants, change the participation goal, and resend invites. However, because we do not store e-mail addresses anywhere, you will have to re-enter the email address of the person you want to re-invite:

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The Team Report now also shows the progress toward your participation goal (if provided). The way this works is simple. When you set up the survey, we ask you to provide how many people you want to participate. Columinity will try to estimate this based on the number of people you invite. Given the number of actual participants, we use this to calculate the progress toward that goal. This is not a hard limit, so more people can participate than estimated. The participation percentage is reported in the Team Report and used in the Teams Dashboard to calculate (overall) participation rates. It is a helpful diagnostic to see how many people participate:

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Simplified reminders

Many teams have told us they'd like it to be easier to set reminders to repeat a Columinity scan with their team (i.e. Kim Jensen from The LEGO Group). We heard you! From this iteration on, you can set Reminders in your Team Report ("Settings" > "Team Settings" > "Reminders") or while setting up new or repeat surveys. More importantly, you can now set repeating reminders that occur every few weeks or months (based on your preference), and not just once.

This is what it looks like in the flow to set up a new team or repeat a scan for an existing team:
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This is what it looks like in the Team Report:
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Other improvements

🐞 Bug: It wasn't possible to clear the Improvement Goal entirely. This is now possible.
🐞 Bug: The email for team notifications was corrupted in some cases when a team went through the "Repeat"-flow for setting up a new survey. This is resolved. We corrected this for the two teams affected by this issue.
🐞 Bug: Several minor styling issues in the Questionnaire and Team Report.
💹 Improvement: Clarified that Improvement Goals are there for you, not for us.

November 16 - Teams can now set improvement goals to guide their improvement actions

14 Nov 12:29
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This release below will be available from November 16 and onward.

Continuous improvement benefits from having a clear goal. Otherwise, it is easy to go after every potential improvement, even though they may not benefit in the bigger picture of what you're trying to achieve. That is why we are releasing a new feature in Columinity that makes it easier to bring focus. Starting this week, teams can set Improvement Goals in their Team Report:

Improvement Goals for new and existing teams

New teams can now set the Improvement Goal as part of the setup flow. Teams can choose up to 3 goals from a predefined set we offer that reflects the most common goals we see. Additionally, they can provide a goal in their own words. This version will be shown in the Team Report and Teams Dashboard. We use the predefined goals to help teams customize the topics they want to measure and in model selection:

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When a team retakes the questionnaire as part of the repeat flow, they can change their improvement goals.

Improvement Goals in the Team Report

When a team sets an Improvement Goal, it is shown at the top of every relevant page in the Team Report to remind teams of their focus:

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The Improvement Goal can be changed or set with "Set". Additionally, teams can choose up to 3 predefined goals we offer. This allows us to customize topic recommendations and support teams in selecting the most relevant model:

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Improvement Goals in the Teams Dashboard

The Improvement Goals of teams are also shown in the Teams Dashboard:

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We also show a message if a goal has not yet set an improvement goal. The Improvement Goal is also included in the export of teams ("Tools" > "Export").

Teams can now change team properties from the Team Report directly

To improve the ability of teams to self-service with Columinity, we've made it possible for them to change their name, team type, and notification email directly from the Team Report. This can be reached through "Settings" > "Team Settings":

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We have also moved team privacy settings to this page (under "Team Privacy").

Other improvements

🐞 Bug: The Teams Dashboard sometimes duplicated teams in the overlay that appears when you click the i-icon right of "Results for the current period [date] to [date] (XXX teams)" in the overview. Thank you to Daniel R for reporting this.
🐞 Bug: The dialog to add new actions or manage existing ones had a scrollbar. We removed some unnecessary whitespace to make the dialog fit without a scrollbar.
🐞 Bug: When editing a snapshot in the Teams Dashboard, there was an odd black box next to "Select topics". This box was supposed to say "BETA", but this never happened. We now show "BETA" here too.
🐞 Bug: In the "Insights" page of the Team Report, there was a leftover text explaining how we hide results when fewer than 3 people have participated. We now handle this more robustly, and the leftover text was removed.
🐞 Bug: In the Subscriptions site, the FAQ contained a bug that simultaneously caused three questions to expand or contract. The link to try columinity was also broken. Thank you, Kevin Rommen, for notifying me of this.
💹 Improvement: Upgraded to Debian 12.
💹 Improvement: The factor "Stakeholder Happiness" was renamed to "Stakeholder Satisfaction".
💹 Improvement: The descriptions for factors "Stakeholders: Team Value", "Stakeholders: Release Frequency", "Stakeholders: Responsiveness" and "Stakeholders: Quality" now more clearly explain that these are measured by asking the stakeholders directly. This wasn't very explicit in the description before, which caused some confusion. Thank you to Christina M for reporting this.