Sticky Notes Galore
We’re a pretty small team over here at Booyant. We are all developers. As a result, we are also all project managers, account reps, sales staff, training experts, janitors, etc. As our workload has become more and more unwieldy – we decided we needed a process to put in place to ensure that nothing falls between the cracks and that everyone is putting their efforts in the appropriate places on any given day.
So over the last year or so we came up with a method that looks something like this:
- Meet every morning as soon as the whole team makes it into the office
- We purchased a series of large white sticky paper and each one was assigned to a client/project and placed on an open space in our conference room.
- We purchased endless amounts of different colored sticky notes and assiged each color a unit of time (1 unit == two hours plus leg stretching time)
Meetings
Upon meeting, we do the following:
- Discuss any new items that have been added to the list in the last 24 hours and create a new sticky detailing the item. That item is written on a sticky of a color that we think best approximates the amount of time required to complete it. The sticky is then placed on the appropriate client/project sheet
- Take any completed stickies from the previous day and move them off their client sheet and place them to the right on the wall. We do this to keep track of everything that has been completed for a project.
- We then discuss priorities for the next 24 hours and everyone grabs enough stickies to fill the next days worth of work
- Rinse, repeat.
Just about right
This process, although probably not ideal for larger companies – seemed to work pretty well for us. It kept everyone abreast of what was going on at the moment – while also allowing us to all be flexible in our current workload.
The only real problems were:
- Our conference room looked like a Sticky Note factory had exploded nearby
- If anyone was working remotely, the process was hard to take offline
Enter Trello
By now, I’m sure most of you have heard about, or tried Trello. The good folks at Fog Creek Software describe Trello as such:
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.
To Booyant, what Trello does, is takes our internal Sticky Note approach to project management and allows us to move it online.
Trello allows you to create as many boards as you like – we user Trello in the following way:
- We have a main Trello Board which is our Project Status Board
- Each project also gets it’s own unique client/project board. Similar to the large sheets of white paper we used previously.
Project Status Board
Our main Project Status Board is the hub where we begin each morning meeting. We call it up on the display in our conference room (no more walls full of stickies). Our Board is broken up into the following lists:
- Potential Projects
- Estimates Required
- On Hold / Awaiting Materials
- Active Projects
- Awaiting Approval
- Complete
Each client is given a card, and that card is placed in the appropriate list. We are also able to assign different users to each project – so at a quick glance we can see exactly what everyone’s current workload looks like.
Client/Project Boards
Each client or project also gets a board within Trello. These are a bit more custom as the lists are really related to the kind of work that needs to be completed for a given project. They may be things like:
- IA Design
- Design
- HTML/CSS
- PHP/MySQL
- Javascript/jQuery
- and so on…
We also have a final list called Active which is where we drag any items currently being worked on.
Other Project Management Tools
Some of the other tools we use as part of our larger project management suite are:
- Basecamp – for all client communication and status updates
- Harvest – for tracking our time
Just For Us
Trello isn’t by any means our one stop shopping tool for project management. But it does fit just right into the other technologies we use to help us get through a given day. Trello is OUR tool. It isn’t for our clients, it isn’t for the other teams we partner with – it is the place where we keep ourselves organized internally.
