Good project management is vital to reaching your goals efficiently. Good project management systems are also typically mind-numbingly boring to design and implement. The inevitable result more often than not is a smorgasbord of post-it notes on windows and walls, or even a whiteboard if you’re fancy. That’s where Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software stepped in.
The Fog Creek founders noted the hodgepodge of ways people use to keep up with their project goals, and designed a very clever system to simplify it: Trello. That was in 2011, and did it ever catch on. Trello was spun off into its own company in 2014, Trello Inc., to better manage its rapid growth.[1] Today it boasts over 10 million users worldwide.[2] Among their current customer base you’ll find Google, The New York Times, PayPal, Adobe, and Kickstarter, but it’s perfectly suited to individuals and small businesses as well. We use it, and we’d like to show it to you. Check it out!
The Trello Board
The Trello board is the riverbed of your workflow. When you sign in to Trello the first thing you’ll do is create a new board. You can give your board a purpose and a name, as narrow or as broad as you want. Use it as a to-do list for home improvement, vacation planning, blogging workflow, whatever floats your boat. My board at WP Ninjas, Editorial Schedule, is where I manage our blogs and collaborate with the Ninja team on ideas and suggestions.
The board is a visual overview of your project(s), but first you have to set your project up. At first you’ll just have a whole lot of empty real estate:
“Add a list”, however, will let you begin populating your board with lists. Lists run from left to right across the top of the board, and can be named whatever you like. Let’s build a sample board that’s a simple to-do list for stuff around the office. We’ll name our lists Tasks, In Progress, Finished, and Delayed.
Since this is an office board we’re making, we’ll invite the whole team so they can see it as well. You can invite teams of people you’ve predefined, or individuals. In this case I’ve added the whole WP Ninjas team to the board. You can set up any board with as few or as many members as you want. Any added member can interact with the board.
So now we have our board and the team has joined, but what good is it? Cards are the functional part of each board. Let’s look at those.
Trello Cards
If the board is the river bed, cards are the water. Cards are created to represent a task (or article, or idea, etc), and moved from list to list to indicate its position in the project’s workflow. The entire team can collaborate on each card. Back to the office to-do list example above, let’s add cards to the Tasks list.
Now anyone on the team can move those cards. There are a number of interaction options for each card that can be accessed simply by clicking on it:
You can assign individuals ownership of the card, label it with a user-defined category tag, turn it into its own checklist, assign it a due date, add an attachment, and more.
I’ve now added members to three of these cards: Kenny to Trash, myself to Recycling, and Devin, Kevin, Kyle, and myself to Ambush Kenny with Nerf Guns. You can see the assigned members’ pictures on each card. If you have the Trello app installed on your device of choice, you’ll get push notifications to that device any time a card that you are assigned to is moved, changed, commented on, etc. You can also choose to be notified by email, and if you are subscribed to the board itself you’ll be notified anytime any card is interacted with.
We can also schedule a due date for any card. For example, trash goes out on Thursdays. The assigned member will receive email reminders prior to that date.
With our cards set up now, they can be moved from list to list. Mid week, our board might look like so:
Any member of the board can pop in at any time, see what tasks have been done, what tasks are being done, what’s left to do, etc. You can also communicate by commenting on the card. A record of comments with time stamps are kept, and typing a member’s name in the text of the comment will ping them via email, desktop, or mobile push notification.
You can add attachments to cards as well, whether from your local machine or one of Trello’s integrated services: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive. On the topic of integrated services, that is one of Trello’s strengths. While there are Trello Business and Enterprise plans that have exclusive integrations for paid customers, there are still incredible services available to free users, such as card automation via Zapier.
Why WP Ninjas use Trello
We are a highly mobile team and members regularly find themselves in different parts of the country. In the last few weeks alone we have had team members gone for a week to Cabo, Mexico and Chicago, Illinois. We semi-regularly work from home, the local coffee shop, or in-transit from WordPress meetups one city over in Chattanooga. It is vital to the success of our company that we are able to maintain communication on project workflows in a localized environment even when the team is anything but local.
Trello meets those needs. While we do make extensive use of Slack, which in itself is a huge upgrade to email, neither of those mediums allow us to localize conversation about a topic in a way that a Trello card does. There is no searching through email, no crawling through the Slack feed looking for what’s been discussed about a topic when the entire conversation takes place on a single Trello card. There is also no doubt that you have access to the whole conversation on that topic. Person C is never missing key information communicated between Person A and Person B because the whole conversation is taking place in one location.
You can see a snapshot of my Editorial Schedule Trello board below, from which I manage the content of our blogs. Any member of the team can drop article ideas into my Ideas & Suggestions list. I grab the ones I want for the near future and move them to Approved, or if James or Kevin sees an idea they really like, they move it to Approved. At a glance, anyone on the team can see what I’m Researching, what I’m Drafting, what I have queued up Ready to be put On Site, and what’s next in line to be Published. When I get an article draft ready, I attach the Google Doc to the Trello card for anyone that wants to give it a read and add suggestions. At any point in this process, any team member can add their 2 cents by commenting on the relevant card.
Trello provides us with a centralized node for our projects’ workflow and keeps the conversation in one place no matter where in the world we all are. It does so in a clean, highly visual, and simple manner. It encourages interactivity, information sharing, and getting that fleeting epiphany in writing and out to relevant team members fast. If this is something you feel would be beneficial to your life or business, you need to take a look at Trello.
This very brief and basic overview has barely skimmed the surface of Trello’s features. For a full summary, see the Trello Resource Board that’s made available after you sign up. For larger companies or more complex organizational needs, there’s Trello Business and Enterprise options. Take a look at Trello today!
- http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-whiteboard-trello-spins-out-of-fog-creek-with-10-3m/
- https://trello.com/10million
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