How to: Trello
Brief overview into how to best use Trello + some tips so it’s effective for you and your team.
This year we want to use trello to help us track the minutiae of tasks that it takes to organize such a large event. We have about 30 organizers and we need some system to track who is assigned to what, and to ensure that no tasks fall between the cracks – as often happened last year.
Trello allows us to have a list of tasks for each cuHacking organizing team:
- coleads
- design
- dev-team
- hacker experience
- logistics
- marketing
- operations
- sponsorship
Each team is given a board, where tasks are added using cards. Each card can be assigned to specific team members, descriptions can be added, checklists, labels, due-dates, and much more. The goal of using trello is to make the job of tracking tasks easier for team leads, and to make it easier for team members to know what they are responsible for, and how to do the tasks assigned to them.
The easier you make it to complete a task, the more likely the task will be completed.
Trello is based-off the kanban project management, created by Toyota in the 1960s. If you want to read more about this, here is a good Link.
It offers a highly visual way to organize your team’s work so that nothing slips through and gets forgotten about or blocked.
Every team board has these five lists. The overall progress of a task should be left –> right.
Ideally: todo –> ready –> in progress –> done
Unideal: todo –> ready –> in progress –> blocked –> in progress –> done
This list is where all tasks start initially. This should contain ideas and tasks that haven’t been fleshed out yet. Use this as a scratch pad to add tasks that occured to you, but you don’t have time to figure out what the scope / steps are just yet.
Once you have an idea of what a task entails you can add a description, checklist, maybe a deadline, links to files on google drive, and then add it to the ready list. At this point a task should be clearly defined and should be ready to the either the progress list or blocked list. These are tasks that you can’t start yet because there are other tasks already in progress. Every task in this list must have a description as explained in the Descriptions section below.
- It’s strongly recommended to add deadlines and checklist if possible.
- You can also assign team members and add labels as well
If there is a task that cannot progress further, either because it is waiting for another task, or because of some issue, you can move it to the blocked list. This is not a good place for a task to be in. This allows us to see any issues as soon as they arise.
Cards may move here only from the ready or in progress lists
These are all the tasks currently being worked on. You should make sure that every task has at least one person assigned to it; if you assign multiple people, make sure one person is responsible for the task completion.
Cards here can move to either the blocked or done list.
The ultimate goal of every task is to be placed in this list. Only move cards here once you are absolutely sure that every step of a task has been completed. The only cards that can move here are from the in progress list.
Each card should be a self-contained task. It may have dependencies with other tasks, but ideally tasks should not overlap; if two tasks overlap they can probably be merged into one task – it might make more sense to have two smaller sub tasks cards rather than one.
Each task should have all the information needed for your team members to know how to complete it, at least in the high-level. The title alone isn’t enough information for a task; if it is, then it should probably be a checklist item for a larger task.
Cards can be assigned to team members, and there must always be one person responsible for completion of the task – the owner.
One of the biggest challenges to using trello, is knowing how large to make tasks – should a task be one large card, or split up into two?
In my experience, it is always easier to break up a card into two rather than merging cards. Create larger cards and break them up if needed; this helps keep the board from getting cluttered and overwhelming.
The most important part of ensuring a task gets done, is to define what the task is, and what each of the steps are to complete it. The best way to do this is by adding a description to each card. Therefore a description is required for each card.
The description should explain:
- The context / purpose of the task why are we doing this task?
- The solution / steps – how to complete the task?
As well as these the card should contain any other information / resources that relate to this task. You can link google drive files, websites, or add ideas in the description.
Trello supports markdown syntax, which allows you to create headers, italicize / bold text, add inline links, create bullet point lists and more.
These are the most important formatting options:
# Header
## Header 2
**bold text** –> bold text
_itaicized text_ –> italicized text
[this is a link](https://cuhacking.com) –> this is a link
- this is a bullet point
- this is an indented bullet point [2 spaces for each level of indentation]
1. This is a numbered bullet point
2. This is the second element in the numbered list
Check out the Markdown Reference find out more Markdown tricks!
Checklists are one of my favourite features of trello. It means to you can see the progress you’ve made on a task, as well as breaking down a task into simple + actionable steps. These checklists don’t have to be super complicated, and if you find that one checklist has many items, you can create a new checklist in the same card to break things down so they’re simpler to understand / follow. Below are examples of a simple and a complex checklist.
Labels allow you and your team members to visually see what types of tasks are on the board. You can create labels based on priority / urgency, type of task, or who is the task owner – the person responsible for the task getting done. It is up to each team to decide what labels work best for them.
On the right you can see some example labels.
Trello automatically sorts them by colour.
You can create a label to signify when a task is done, as well as putting it in the done list. This a good way to confirm if a task is done.
Each card has an Activity section at the bottom sorted top-to-bottom by most recent first. I often find this cluttered, so to only show comments, you can select the Hide Details option on the left-hand side.
You can @name other team members in a comment, this is especially useful if you have questions_ – though, it is often easier to use slack for longer conversations._
Comments are most useful when used as a notepad to store information that doesn’t need a full document on the google drive _– especially since you can edit comments._
You can link your google drive to trello which allows you to browse and add google drive files to a card, using what trello calls a Power-Up.
You can find the Get More Power-Ups button below the top-right-hand side panel.
This gives you quick access to files and ensures that files are not forgotten about and fall through the cracks.
For more information on how to link google drive to trello, see this website.
You can also link slack to trello using a Power-Up, in much the same way as the google drive Power-Up. For more information see this website.
It’s critically important to assign each task an owner – someone responsible for the completion of a task. You can assign additional team members to a task, since many tasks do not solely involved one person; you can also assign yourself so you can be notified by any updates.
If you assign someone a task on trello, you should also message them on slack so they are aware of their task. Do not assume that by simply assigning them on trello they will be aware of being assigned a task.
Make sure they understand what their are supposed to do and how to do it; provide more information if needed. If they are unable to complete the task due to school commitments or otherwise, reassign the task to another team member.
q
Quickly shows only the cards assigned to you.
- Very useful to reduce clutter and focus on only your tasks
d
Add deadlines / due-dates for card while hovering your mouse over it.
a
Assign team members to a card while hovering your mouse over it.
/
Brings up the search bar...
space
Pressing space while hovering over a card assigns – or unassigns – you to that card.
cmd + c / ctrl + c
If you hover the mouse over a card, and press cmd + c [ctrl + c for windows].
- The link for this card will be copied to your clipboard
?
Pressing shift + / opens up a shortcuts panel showing you all the shortcuts in case you forgot how trigger one.
If you like keyboard shortcuts, here is the ultimate trello keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet.
Go from a trello-zero to a trello-hero with this handy guide.
The ultimate board of trello tips + tricks here.