Digité, a company that develops lean/agile application life-cycle management products, is announcing that it is offering its Lean/Agile Project Management software Swift-Kanban (http://www.digite.com/swift/swift-kanban.html) for free to non-profits. Digite is also launching integration of Swift-Kanban with Atlassian's Jira to bring developer issue management and helpdesk operations to the Kanban board.
Swift-Kanban leverages the Kanban Method developed by David J. Anderson to help organizations become more lean in communications and product development using highly visual management and as a result deliver products and services more quickly and with higher quality.
Some of the key features of the web-based product include a visual Kanban Board, with color-coded drag-n-drop cards, work-item classification, to-do checklists as well as metrics, dashboards, and reports. Because of the visual nature of the product, Swift-Kanban allows you to visualize your workflow with post-it-like notes on a Kanban board, each representing a workflow stage through which your work can flow.
Users can create personalized dashboard views available for each team member, and create lanes for each task. You can also pre-define a list of tasks and checklists for each card type and add discussion threads, audit logs, attachments, rich text editing, notifications, Inbox, role-based security.
While Swift-Kanban is already being used by software developers, the company is looking to appeal to organizations outside of the engineering world, hence the free offering for non-profits. Competitors in the space include Basecamp, Sprintly, (http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/joe-stump-launches-sprintly/) Trello (http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/joel-spolskys-trello-is-a-simple-workflow-and-list-manager-for-groups/) and others.
Here's an example of a Kanban board:
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