What a tool - Trello
My team look after a wide range of work. We get roped into everything from intranet redesigns, to email marketing strategies, to video production and social media campaigns. There are a lot of moving parts. Sound familiar?
The stress of keeping track
None of us are superhuman (well, maybe a couple of you), so remembering all the details, updates, deadlines and schedules can feel impossible - sometimes just trying to keep track of everything that’s going on can double your stress levels before you even think about how your going to get any of it done (i’m hoping this doesn’t sound familiar, but I’m pretty sure it does).
My saviour
Early on in my career I started looking for tools to help manage the amount of info us comms professionals have to juggle; Note pads, post-it notes, dictaphones, memory palaces… Then one day I was introduced to Trello, and it has changed my life.
The ultimate to-do lists
Trello is basically a project management tool that lets you create the ultimate to-do lists. You can set up a Trello Board however it suits you or your team. In my team we use Trello Boards to track the progress of developments on our website, video production projects and collaborating on news content for our intranet etc. But most importantly we use Trello to list and track the progress of our individual work tasks.
Better memory
For me personally this means as long as I add it to Trello it will get done. I can add as much detail as I like: images, documents and copy. And I can set reminders that come to me as an email, or a message on my phone. Trello has become my more reliable (searchable, taggable, shareable) memory.
This guy uses Trello in a similar way me for my day to day, and helpfully he’s made a video about it:
Great for management
As a manager, using Trello means I can dip into my team’s Trello boards to check progress of actions, add new actions or even add images or documents I think would be useful for their work. It also means if someone comes over needing an ‘urgent update for the [insert important name here] any of the team can give an update - obviously that never happens though...
You can assign items on a Trello Board to your team members, tag different actions as part of one project - so you can view the actions for only one project at a time, or all the actions for everything, add deadlines and much, much more.
Gov.uk have written about how they use Trello here.
Not the only one
For me Trello takes away that nagging feeling that I’m forgetting something and gives me the ultimately satisfying feeling of moving a card from ‘to-do’ to ‘done’. But it’s not the only tool that can do this.
Monday.com gets pretty good reviews
Asana has been used by some big corporations for some time
Pete Richardson
Digital Communications Manager at London Fire Brigade