Imagine a car factory. Orders are sent to the plant, a team of workers performs a series of steps, the same for each vehicle, as the vehicle navigates the line, and at the end a finished car emerges.
It works because everyone knows what needs to be done at each stage. Each step has been defined in advance and the movement of the car is analogous to the progress of the job at hand. It's one of the most efficient and easy-to-understand ways to organize workloads, and one that tools like Trello have extended to knowledge work, the service sector, and even personal projects.
Trello Review: What is it?
Trello is a project management suite, where digital 'cards' and a virtual workflow (or 'board') replace the auto parts and production line we described above. Each 'card' contains a job or responsibility, and is grouped with other cards based on their position in your workflow. You could have one group (or list) for jobs yet to be done, a second list for jobs in progress, and another for jobs you've already completed. Or, if you're working on a website, the cards can be organized by team: one job listing for designers, another for your coders, a third for writers, and so on, down to the team each establishes. live page. That way, when a job moves from the first team to the next, they can drag their card from the design column to the coding group. Your coders will know at a glance that it is now their responsibility to move that part of the project forward.
By breaking down workflows into steps, organizations can better understand what needs to be done at each stage and the order in which jobs are best tackled. And, as steps are dragged from column to column, all team members have a live view of how the project is progressing and where bottlenecks are forming (if any). This will help when allocating budget and resources.
Trello: organization features
The card-based workflow is inspired by the Japanese kanban system. This translates into a sign, and its basic essence was developed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Toyota. However, while kanban may be Trello's main feature, Premium and Enterprise users can divide tasks and teams however it makes the most sense, and in whatever way gives them the most effective view of their projects.
When jobs are time-critical, they can use the timeline view to set start and due dates, and then organize each step so that those dates have some relationship to the natural passage of time. Similarly, a calendar view puts those steps in a grid so team members can see at a glance, without scanning the timeline or scrolling through a board of cards, what needs to be delivered and when. Being able to refactor a single version of the truth in this way means that you are saved the task of copying or synchronizing from one organizational tool to another, and the likelihood of introducing errors into the process is greatly reduced.
There is a table view for those more comfortable working with spreadsheets and, for special use cases, a location-dependent map view. Trello's example use case for this particular view is real estate agents mapping available properties, but it could also be used to track representatives across a sales network, geographic areas of responsibility, or assets leased to clients.
Trello: Automation and integration
If you're implementing Trello after years of perfecting a workflow, creating your board should be easy. But, if you are using it to set up a new process or to rework a process that is not running correctly, you can start with a template. There are dozens to choose from, designed for use in a wide and diverse range of industries. For creatives, templates to organize artist commissions, photography sessions or research projects; for human resources, recruiting channels, employee handbooks and learning trackers; For sales teams, there are customer onboarding workflows, Etsy order fulfillment processes, and sales funnels. Some of them are created by Trello itself and others by third parties.
Once you've defined your board and assigned your jobs to cards, you can manually drag cards from one list to another to manage workflow over time. Or you can add actions to your cards using Butler, Trello's codeless automation layer. Butler allows you to add buttons to cards that, when clicked, perform several tasks at once, such as marking a job as completed and notifying other members of your team of that fact. Or you can add a series of buttons to the board, instead of a card, to switch between different sorting criteria.
For many organizations, Trello will be just another app that your team uses to communicate and manage workflows and data. It's no surprise, then, that it integrates with common business tools like Slack, Github, and IFTTT. That means you can use Butler to post to messaging channels, like Slack or email, notifying your colleagues about changes. That way, no one will have an excuse to miss important updates.
With boosters, you go even further, as many integrate specific features from third-party services like Mailchimp and Box. Others perform useful tasks with a single click, such as exporting your cards and dashboards to Excel or CSV, accessing files stored in Google Drive, or tracking a sales pipeline in Salesforce.
Enhancers cover automation and integration, depending on what you want to do and whether the plugin relies on external resources. By turning on Zendesk, for example, you can attach tickets and Zendeck views to Trello cards so that support teams can group similar or equivalent requests to minimize repetition; The Last Seen power-up tells you when a team member was last seen using the board; and turning on Smart Deadlines calculates due dates with reference to appointments in an iCal calendar.
In the unlikely event that there is no ignition for the feature you want to integrate, you can create your own by consulting Atlassian's extensive developer documentation.
Trello: How much does it cost?
Trello follows the well-known SaaS model, with a generous free tier and three paid plans. For many small businesses, the free tier will be enough, with unlimited cards, mobile and desktop apps, automation features, integration with third-party tools like Slack and Google Drive, and unlimited activity logs.
However, you're limited to ten boards, file uploads are capped at 10MB each, and while you can invite an unlimited number of users to collaborate at the time of writing, this will be capped at 10 starting April 8, 2024.
Upgrading to Standard for $5 per user per month gives you unlimited boards, lets you break projects into smaller chunks with individual due dates and responsibilities, and gives you the option to add custom fields to your cards.
Premium, at $10 per user per month, gives you more flexible views of your workflow. In addition to the signature kanban layout, you can switch between calendar, map, timeline, and table views, and use the dashboard view to get real-time information and visually communicate progress. Trello believes this should help avoid bottlenecks by anticipating team needs before they become critical. He can export his data when using the Premium plan and there are several useful security tools, such as restricting invitations by domain and the option to deactivate members. He can run commands (and optionally disable commands for some users), group related boards into collections, and create templates.
Each of these features carries over to the Enterprise level, where they are complemented by control over what type of attachments can be added to cards, unlimited workspaces, and more extensive board management. As is common with enterprise plans, the price you pay depends on the number of users you need. For 50, the entry level, you're looking at $17.50 per user per month. When you reach 5,000 users, that amount drops to $7.38.
Each of those prices applies if you commit and pay one year in advance. If you want to pay month-to-month, you can do so on the Standard and Premium plans, at $6 and $12.50 per user per month respectively. Annual billing is required on the Enterprise plan.
Everything is hosted in the cloud, so there are no additional expenses for on-site infrastructure (and, consequently, no self-hosting option). In addition to the browser-based web application, there are mobile clients for Android and iOS/iPadOS, and desktop implementations for Windows and macOS.
Trello: Is it worth it?
Trello's most logical competition is a wall full of sticky notes. But that would soon become complicated, team members would have to stand in front of it to track progress, and they couldn't easily rearrange the “data” contained in the notes without it being complicated to put it back together.
A more appropriate comparison would be with a platform like Monday.com, which also has table and kanban views, a low-code programming environment for automation, and integration with other common business tools like Box, Teams, and Slack. These aren't the only project management platforms that integrate kanban views, either. Asana, Airtable, and Microsoft Project offer card-based organization, making Trello and Monday.com two options among many. And, if you prefer to use open source solutions, OpenProject includes kanban, has a free community edition in addition to its paid tiers, and can be self-hosted.
However, Trello's ease of use, generous free tier, and extensive user base mean that even in the face of serious competition, it remains a tempting proposition. The free plan may be designed for small teams and will soon be capped at 10 seats, but that's enough for many smaller organizations and should give larger players an idea of their suitability before reaching for the checkbook.
It's comforting to find a product that remains so flexible, easy to understand and familiar as it matures. It requires a lot of hard work from project management, freeing up team members to focus on the needs of the project itself, rather than the tool that keeps it on track.
