“Where are the papers I had on my desk?” was one of the common asked questions at the office, before we started using Trello. Now these papers are inside a free online project management system – available 24/7 from all devises, everywhere. There are dusins of alternatives such as basecamp.com, asana.com etc. but here is why we choose this one.
Reasons to use Trello as a publisher
- Freedom of placement. We have people in different locations and countries and some working from home some days etc. and therefore the paper archive had it’s limitations.
- It’s free. We choose Trello for our online system, since it’s free part was important in the beginning, so we could test without costs.
- Easy-to-use has proven to be more important than first anticipated, since we constantly need to involve new people (and even though they are ‘new’, doesn’t mean they are young and easy adapters).
- Easy-on-the-eyes sounds like a superficial thing, but it turns out that many archive/update tasks will not be carried out, since we are busy and will rather prioritize something more rewarding. So when the system is easy-on-the-eyes (or fun) it dramatically helps people to do it. Just placing a check mark in a box is fun — more fun than writing ‘ok’ somewhere in an Excel spread sheet field no one else sees. There’s a whole science on motivational incentives / behavior called gamification.
How Trello works
Trello consists of boards. A board is a project – or a department. The basis layout is 3 lists (columns): ToDo, Doing and Done. Then a task is created as a card in the ToDo list and when started, it’s moved to the ‘doing-list’ and then to the ‘done-list’. Easy to understand. Each member will have a profile picture that can be placed on a card, to indicate that they have something to do here. Besides the involved members, under each card you can have descriptions, check lists, attached files and much more.
How we use Trello at Scandinavia
To begin with, we just choose an area – product development – and created a board for that. When we started listing all the projects we had going on – and ideas in our heads/notepads, we were quite surprised. There was a lot. Even though we can’t go into all projects at once, it’s still nice to get the ideas out of your head and into a system where they can be tested and either grow or be properly terminated.
Here is the current board “Product development” where card are moved through different stages from idea to printing.
Hope you will also find Trello helpful.