Using Trello for agile marketing
What is agile marketing?
As mentioned in my last blog, agile project management techniques can help marketing teams improve their strategic alignment, team productivity and delivery momentum.
But which tool is the best at helping marketing teams structure their new agile approach? In this blog, I’m going to look at Trello.
What’s Trello?
Trello is a popular collaboration tool that positions itself as a virtual white board, filled with lists of sticky notes or 'task cards' (equivalent to Atlassian JIRA’s stories).
“Trello’s flexibility is both a blessing and a curse”
Task cards can be assigned to individuals or teams and then categorised in kanban-style columns to indicate completeness or delivery window.
Specific task cards can be assigned a delivery date and users can attach photos, documents or attachments from other data sources. Naturally, it’s easy to place checklists (equivalent to JIRA’s sub-tasks) and comments against each task card for collaboration with others.
Trello is simple to use and incredibly flexible which is, to my mind at least, both a blessing and a curse.
What I like about Trello
Trello’s popularity is due to its ability to be used for just about any form of task management - whether organising an upcoming team meeting, content calendar, even your weekly shopping list!
The default setup for a Trello kanban board is to have three columns — TO DO, DOING, and DONE — where you can easily see task cards based on what needs to be done, what your team is currently doing, and what you’ve completed already.
If you want to share your Trello project with a colleague or client, Trello becomes an excellent way to stay aligned without relying on cumbersome top-posted email threads.
Trello’s free Calendar ‘Power-up’ allows users to view and manage kanban tasks in a traditional calendar format
Trello’s ‘Power-up’ eco-system is particularly impressive. If you’re using a calendaring app, cloud storage solution, code repository, service desk, video publishing platform, collaboration tool, email automation suite… there’s a power-up for that! Seamless integrations with third-party apps help teams get accustomed with Trello and start seeing value, fast.
Another excellent premium feature is ‘Collections’. Since Trello tasks cards can be organised in an infinite number of different boards and moved around at will, Collections are necessary to help provide a high-level structure equivalent to JIRA’s Epics. As such, Collections let you align tasks cards and boards with your long-term strategic goals.
What I don’t like about Trello
Adding labels, due dates, checklists and comments in task cards
Trello’s flexibility means that it can to be all things to all men. Therefore for marketing teams unschooled in the principles of agile project management Trello isn’t prescriptive enough. Rather than helping track the status of tasks through the course of a defined sprint, its boards can easily be misused. For example, if task cards are organised on a board without indicating their completion status they can quickly become overloaded with ill-defined activities which become stale. Momentum is lost.
The absence of sprint timelines is particularly noticeable. The setting of start and end dates for a sprint is an excellent way of focusing minds on delivery within a specific timeframe. Here JIRA wins hands down.
Similarly Trello’s omission of story points means it can be challenging to balance workload across your team or get a sense of velocity over time.
How to configure Trello for agile marketing
Unlike JIRA, Trello doesn’t try to provide users with any best practice workflows for adopting agile. The product’s philosophy is to fit around your team’s existing workflows. This is fine if your workflows are operating well, but not so great if your team is transitioning from the inefficiencies of waterfall to a new, unfamiliar project management methodology.
Therefore, one suggested approach is to create two types of Trello board:
Task backlog - covering the entire fiscal year with columns of task cards organised by quarter;
Sprint tracker - covering the current sprint with columns indicating task card completeness.
Using this configuration, you can periodically transfer planned tasks for the upcoming sprint from the task backlog to the sprint tracker. Once there, task cards can be moved from TO DO, DOING, and DONE columns all the while ensuring that your scrum master defines sprint review dates outside of Trello. Collections and labels can be also used to ensure strategic alignment and consistency.
What next?
Trello really is a great tool - it’s easy to use, quick to adopt and immensely flexible. However, the absence of a prescribed agile workflow within the tool means that any existing project management deficiencies within your team are likely to follow you to Trello.
My suggestion is to try to emulate as much of the workflow outlined in my Atlassian JIRA post as possible. If you get it right, Trello’s user friendly UI, fun customisation options and integration with third party apps will quickly make it a favourite.