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Managing Processes with Trello

Trello is a fast-growing collaboration tool used by tens of millions of people. Aside from being great for personal task management, it’s used by teams and companies of all sizes to collaborate and reduce reliance on e-mail.

Unlike traditional process and project management tools, Trello doesn’t make many assumptions about your process, nor forces information to be structured in a certain way. This makes it very easy to use, suitable for a wide array of applications, and “agile” — it’s easy to refine your workflow as your understanding of the process evolves.

Interspersed in the text, you will see a few grey boxes. These are actual Butler commands that you can use to automate your Trello workflow. You can ignore these boxes if you’re not a Butler user.

We can think of a process as the progression of work items through different states, from an initial state to a final state.

For example, an Editorial Process may consist of progressing articles from an “Idea” state to a “Published” state through intermediate states “Research”, “Writing”, and “Editing”.

Moving from one state to another state is called a transition. For example, a task may move from the “Resume Received” state to the “Phone Interview” state.

In Trello, we can hold each work item in a separate card, and represent the states as lists. Moving a card between lists represents a transition between states.

For a process to be effective, items need to reach a final state within a reasonable timeframe. This implies that each state needs to have a finite duration. A typical goal of process improvement is reducing overall process time.

In our example, one of our goals may be to give an initial response to all candidates within 10 working days. We set a due date when an item enters the state in order to indicate this.

In a human-driven process, it’s the responsibility of one or several persons to make sure an item moves from state to state until completion.

In our example, when the card enters the “Phone Interview” state, we want it to be assigned to a recruitment coordinator, who will in turn assign it to a phone interviewer.

In Trello, any member assigned to a card is also automatically subscribed to the card, receiving notifications about changes to the card and 24 hours before the due date (if the card has one).

Trello boards can be filtered to display only the cards assigned to certain member(s), and users can see a feed of the cards assigned to them in their Trello home page.

We want our states to be “chunky” rather than “trivial”. By this, we mean that a transition from one to the next should require meaningful work or changes to the work item. A chunky state often involves several steps or checks to be performed on the item.

In our example, we use a checklist to track the interview schedule in the On-Site Interviews state, and we use another checklist to track the different materials we need to send to the hiring committee later on. We also use a checklist to track the different candidate checks (e.g. references) before issuing an offer.

So far, we have introduced the basic process-driving elements: who (members), what (checklists), and when (due dates). They should be the focus of your attention as you start designing your workflow.

As it moves through the process, information about a work item and its processing will be gathered or produced. In our example, this information could be a resume, interviewers’ feedback, a candidate’s special status that needs to be accommodated for (e.g. a disability), etc.

Trello offers several ways to store this information in cards. You can skip these and come back later if you find them confusing at this point.

Importantly, you can also attach a link to another Trello card. We can store our job requisitions in another board (perhaps as part of another process), and link a candidate’s card to the relevant job requisition card.

A label has a color and, optionally a text. There can be multiple labels with the same color but different text. There is also colorless labels that only contain text and are not displayed at the front of the card.

For example, we can use a blue label named “Internal Candidate” to indicate candidates that already work for the organization.

Labels can also be used to differentiate between sub-states within a state (e.g. a green “Offer Issued” label for certain items in the “Offer” state), but if you can use custom fields (see below), we recommend using a dropdown custom field instead.

Labels are displayed in the Calendar Power-Up, and can be filtered and searched for. They are also great for automation.

A resume is an example of unstructured data. If I need to find the candidate’s phone number, or their highest academic achievement, I need to open the file and read it to locate the information. By contrast, in a structured system each individual piece of data is held in a separate field.

Aside from structuring some of the item data, we can also use custom fields to hold process information (metadata) in a way similar to labels.

When it comes to implementing a workflow to manage your process, we recommend following these steps:

Creating a workflow often has the side effect of making you think about your processes in detail. This usually has a positive effect, but don’t overthink it.

Human-driven processes are fluid and evolve as we encounter exceptions and adapt to change. Trying to cover every corner case or make your workflow watertight from the outset is a recipe for frustration.

The beauty of Trello is that it’s not a straightjacket: if your base workflow covers 90% of the cases, you can create an exception list to handle special cases separately, or create a label to mark a type of exception. If a standard checklist doesn’t contain a few items you need for some special case, you can simply add the items to the checklist on that card only.

For example, a candidate may have interviewed with us in the past, and we only want to do two interviews instead of our usual three. We can simply edit the checklist in their card to remove the third interview.

Try to limit your process to a reasonable number of meaningful states.

Instead of a single “Offer” state, we could have states for “Preparing Offer”, “Waiting for Offer Approval”, “Offer Issued”, and “Response Received”. This is clearly too many.

It’s better to mark these sub-states with labels, and filter or sort by label to see how many are in each situation within the current state.

A rule of thumb is if you can substitute the word “stage” for the word “state” and the states still sound chunky or hefty enough. Compare:

In the second example, it sounds like our stages are very small. Although this is a subjective matter, the point is not to create micro-states.

Every item must reach a final state in the process eventually. In a well-run process, items don’t hang around in middle states forever.

Finished items shouldn’t hang around either. Once your card has reached a final state, it’s best to remove it from view so that it doesn’t distract from running the process. A way to do this in Trello is to simply archive the card.

Archiving is enough for many workflows. But if you run a high-volume process, likely to generate thousands of cards over time, and periodically need to consult past work items, it will become a needle-in-a-haystack situation. In this case, we recommend to move the processed cards to another board instead of archiving them. The cards should be placed in a different list for each week or month, making it easier to find them by processing date.

This also makes it easier to comply with data retention policies: you can simply delete the history board and re-create it periodically to delete all cards in it.

It’s tempting to use Trello as a team To-Do list and define your states by date: have states for “On-Site Interviews This Week”, “On-Site Interviews Next Week”, “On-Site Interviews This Month”, etc.

But these are not actual states. The fact that the interview is later this month doesn’t change the fact that the candidate is in the “On-Site Interviews” stage of the process.

Instead, use sorting and filtering by due date, and the Calendar Power-Up to have a temporal view of what needs to be done next.

There is an exception to this, which is when time does substantially change the state of an item. For example, in an Editorial Workflow, stories scheduled to be published tomorrow are qualitatively different from stories that haven’t been given a publication date.

If you find yourself defining a workflow that involves a final date based on a cascade of task dependencies, then you need to think about project management, not process management.

Trello is also great for project management, but it’s a different use case. Of course, you can have a process for project management to make sure you run projects consistently. We think that deserves its own separate article.

Once you’ve created an initial workflow, run the process with it for a while and gather experience. As you learn what works and what doesn’t, make incremental changes.

For example, you may realize that a checklist is unnecessary, or that two states end up being the same and you need to merge them. You may want to add a custom field to store a piece of information that users find useful for the process. Etc.

Let what works best for your users evolve the design. Keep it simple and don’t lose focus on the most frequent use cases.

Once the workflow has been implemented and is running for a while, it’s normal to notice repetitive actions being performed all the time. At the end of the day, a process is about consistency and repeatability.

Automation can free you from many monotonous tasks by:

Having Trello actions done automatically improves consistency and reduces human errors. Automation can also improve process quality by validating transition conditions and capturing workflow errors.

Just like when designing the workflow, our recommendation is to start simple. Focus on automating the most important cases and don’t try to cover every eventuality. Iterate and improve over time.

Trello’s capabilities make it a great tool for managing processes, particularly those that are fuzzy and have high variability.

In this article, we’ve described a basic model for processes, and how to design a Trello workflow for them. We’ve also shared best practices learned through our experience. Finally, we’ve touched on workflow automation.

Thank you for reading. We look forward to your feedback and questions.

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