Speaker 1: Hello, everybody. My name is Brittany Joiner, and I am so excited to be part of the PM72 conference. This is amazing. I've been so excited for this event and to see it happen. So I'm excited you're here today, and I'm excited we're going to talk about my favorite tool, which is Trello, and how it is applicable to you, project managers. So to get started, I just want to tell you a little bit more about myself. My name is Brittany Joiner, as I said. I've been using Trello since about 2011. I'm a big fan of it. I discovered it when I was working in a marketing agency, and we were using it to keep track of all the different tasks we had for our clients. And since then, I've been using it for my own personal projects, companies that I've been working with, side projects, and just about anything that I can think of. Full-time, I'm a software engineer at Elastic, but in my free time, you'll see me talking about Trello and productivity on my YouTube channel and my newsletter and doing stuff like this, giving different talks, trying to help people learn about cool tools that can make their life a little bit easier and simpler. And feel free to give me a follow here. I've got my username on Twitter down here, my handle over here. If you ever want to reach out and talk about Trello, productivity, or just about anything else, feel free to reach out to me. I keep talking about this Trello thing, but you may not know what Trello is. Let's dive in and talk about Trello. I'll start by giving you the brief overview of what exactly is Trello. What does it do? The way I like to describe Trello is it's basically a digital whiteboard with supercharged sticky notes. What I mean by that is it's a project management tool. The concept of it is that there is a board that has cards, which are specific items and elements that you organize tasks or contacts with, and you group those by lists on your board. This will all make sense in a minute. We're going to go through this in a little bit more detail in the next slide. Then I'm actually going to spend a majority of this presentation going through a demo and showing you the ins and outs of Trello and how to use it and what all you can do with it. It's a pretty cool tool. It's trusted by a lot of big companies and also a lot of small companies. There's a lot of different use cases for it and ways that people are using it to organize their teams and get business done. Let's talk a little bit more in detail about it now to be a little more tangible. What can you do with this digital whiteboard? First of all, you can access it from anywhere. You can access it from your phone, from your desktop, any browser. You can even access it offline. I've been known to use it on my phone or my iPad while I'm at the airport in an airplane and jot down different ideas that come to mind. Later on, I'm able to sort through them and see them across all of my boards. You can control access to your boards. For instance, you can make sure whatever information you have is either public, available to everyone in the world, or just available to people on your team, or even just private only to you or people you specifically invite to your board. The other key component of this digital whiteboard is using these lists that you can organize these sticky notes, which we'll get to in a second. Just think of it as if you had a physical in-person whiteboard. You'd probably be doing something similar to categorize the sticky notes on your board and grouping them in different sections and maybe moving them through. That's how we use lists in Trello. Lastly, your board is really powerful because it helps you view all of the information that you have in those cards at a mile high sort of view. You're able to see a dashboard of different stats. You can see a timeline or a calendar of how all of your items work together. You can even view them in a map if you add location data to the cards. Let's talk now more about zooming in. What are these supercharged sticky notes and what do they do? What they are, you see a picture here. We're going to go into more detail in the demo part here in a minute. These are the supercharged sticky notes that are just like sticky notes you'd use on your whiteboard at home and pick them up and drag them around and move them. Rather than just having a note on them or maybe even being a certain type of color, you can customize these a lot more. You can add specific members to it and that controls who gets notifications about what's happening on them or how they show up in different reports. You can assign labels to it to help categorize either the status of a task, the department it's affiliated with, the project it's with, however you want to use them. They're completely customizable. You can add subtasks with checklists. You can add dates, start and due dates, and you can attach different files, links, images, other Trello boards and cards. You can even add location data if you want to be able to visualize your cards in a map view. And if none of these work, then you can even add custom fields to add just about anything else you might want to to these cards. So it's a really handy tool and that's kind of your mile-high overview of it. But we're not here just to talk about Trello. We're here for project managers and I don't work for Trello. I'm not here to sell you Trello. I have no personal vesting in if you use Trello or not. I just think it's a really great tool and I think it's something that's helped me and a lot of other people and I think maybe it could help you. And here's some reasons why I think project managers might be interested in using Trello. First of all, it has a free plan and it's very easy to get started with. There's no complicated learning. You don't have to go through all sorts of training just to get up and running with it. You can create your account for free and demo a lot of the features for free. You don't even need a paid plan and there's a lot of value in the free plan of Trello. So you don't have to invest in a large tool and learn all sorts of things about it before you can actually start seeing value from it. Second of all, it's a very versatile tool. So you can do just about whatever you want with it. I like to explain it as Legos. So you can do whatever you want with Legos. You can build a Hogwarts castle or a race car or whatever you want to build with it. Sometimes you just need a guide to kind of help you know where the pieces go, but it's completely customizable. And if you can use it for one use case, you can use it for another and it fits a lot of different things. So it's a really, really handy tool in that sense. And then lastly, it's a trusted tool with lots of integration. So there's lots of different companies that you're probably already working with with different tools that integrate with Trello so that it can be a very seamless sort of experience to embedding your workflows. And there's an engaged community. So if you're ever like, man, I'm stuck on this or I need help setting this up or I have more questions, there's lots of content out there and plenty of people willing to help and jump in and answer questions and give you more ideas and solve your problems. So without further ado, I think it's demo time. Let's jump in and let's actually look at this tool, shall we? So I've got this board right here. I called it my single project board. And it's an example board I put together just for this talk that's, let's just say I'm about to do a product launch for an airport tracking app. It lets people track what airport they've been in. If you're a travel nerd like me, maybe you enjoy that sort of thing. But it's, yeah, it's your basic sort of project setup here. And so this is kind of your format for what a board looks like. And if you want to create your own board, it's super easy. You just click create, create board, and then you'll just specify the team you want it to be on. That team and workspace are kind of synonymous. It's basically Trello's way of organizing paid plans versus not paid plans. And a good way to think of it is the group of people you're using Trello with. So that's what you would set there. And then your visibility, it defaults to workspace. So anybody else on that team with you, but you can quickly change it to private or public where anybody can see it. And you have to double opt in to make it public. So don't worry about accidentally doing that. It's fine leaving it to the default of workspace, which if you're the only one in the workspace, that's basically the same thing as private. So feel free to do that. Or you can actually start with a template. So you can see if you're new to Trello, you may not have any templates already. But if you've been using Trello before, then you might already have a bunch of templates in here. And then there's recommended templates from other users besides just you. And you can actually click this button to explore even more templates here. So you can see boards that people have created in different ways they're using Trello and get some inspiration. And since project management is actually one of the key use cases for Trello, there's actually a whole section of templates of how project managers are using Trello. So if you need some inspiration and you're just getting started, hopefully next couple of minutes, I'll be able to show you a useful workflow for you. But if not, feel free to take a peruse around here and see if any of these make sense. And you can see how people like Atlassian are using Trello and this tool to be able to organize their projects and things that they've got going on. So let's go back to our board over here and take a look. So now that we know how to create a board, if you want to create a list, all you do is, this will add up right here, and you just type the name of the list to whatever you want it to be. Name of the list. And let's say you're like, I actually want the beginning of my board. You just drag it over there, drag it around wherever you want it to go. And same with adding a card. You just type whatever you want the title to be. And it creates a card. And within that card, you have all the superpowers that you would ever imagine and want to have. You can add members to a card. So I can add myself to a card. If there were other people on this board, I can add them too. Which, by the way, if you want to add more people, you just go up to here to share. And you can create this link and share it with whoever you'd like. You can send it over email, Slack, text, whatever you want to do. And it's a public link for people to join the board however you'd like. Or you can specifically invite them with their email address here. And that's a good way to, you know, get some collaboration going on in here. But once you've created the card, you can add whoever you'd like to it. And I'll show you when we start looking at filters in a minute why that is so helpful. But adding members is a good way to keep track of who's doing what. You can use labels to organize the status of a project or a category. I sort of set up this board where each list is a different sort of department that might be involved in a project you're managing. But you could just as easily name these lists anything you want. They could be statuses. And you could say to do, doing, and done. And instead of using the labels as a status, you could use the labels to define which team they're associated with. Or if you have multiple projects running at once and you want one, them all on the same board, I'll explain some stuff for that in a minute. But you could also just keep them all in one board and have the labels explain which project they're with or the lists explain which project they're with. So this is where it kind of comes down to, it's kind of like Legos, right? And Trello is a box of Legos. And if you want help figuring out exactly what you want to build with it, you might want to get a blueprint. But at the end of the day, the world's your oyster and you can kind of build this however you want. And I recommend playing around with a couple things. You might try it like this and feel like, ah, no, I actually think I want it the other way. And it's totally fine to play around with that. Other things you can do within a card, you can add a checklist, which is basically a list of subtasks. And one of the things I really like about that is when you check something off, it shows you your progress. So you can actually see, okay, I'm 33% done with this task. Okay, now I'm 67% done with this task. And you can high check items to only see, okay, here's what I've actually still got to do. I kind of like leaving them up to see I've made some progress, I've done some things, but you can set that up to be whatever works for you there. Another thing you can do is add these dates. And we have start and due dates. And so the way those work is your start date is obviously the beginning and your due date is when you'd like that to be done. And you can specify when you'd like reminders about that. And it will remind anybody who's a member of the card. And so that way you can get notifications, say, hey, this is due. But that's also helpful for viewing your tasks in a timeline view. So for instance, just to show you what that looks like, you have a couple different views with your board. And timeline is one way of viewing your cards by start and due date. And something that's really cool about timeline is it actually puts them in the list that they're in. So you can see how your cards are organized by the list that they're in. And if you need to change anything, let's say you want these two to happen at the same time, you just move that card and it will actually go update that card's due date. Or maybe you're like, actually, I don't want those to happen at the same time. Brittany's a little too busy this week. Let me move something out to next week. You can easily drag and drop it and it will move those due dates accordingly. So it makes planning really easy. And you can group these however you want. You can view it by month, day, week. And you can also organize these on the side, not just by list, but you can look at it by label or by member if you wanted to be able to see how work is pacing. Like, does Brittany have too much going on this week? Or however you want to organize that. Or by label. Or you can just group it in no way and view it in a normal timeline. The calendar view does exactly what it sounds like. It's pretty similar and lets you also kind of see the cards in that start and due date format to let you kind of visualize that workflow in a calendar view. So that's why the due dates are really important. And they're really helpful. You can also attach things to your cards. So this is really helpful because you can't do everything in Trello, unfortunately. I've tried. And while it's great for a lot of things, there's some things you still might collaborate in a Google Doc for. And you can just link that Google Doc over in here. You don't have to worry about, oh, man, well, how do they know to go into Google Drive now? Just link the doc right here and it can immediately take them to that. If you have images saved on Dropbox, you can bring those over here. You can literally have all the assets you need for a project all in one place. So you can also link other Trello cards and other Trello boards. So let's say, for instance, let's say this task is actually dependent on this task. Maybe what I'd want to do is give this one a label of like dependency and give it a due date. Let's just put it there. And also assign that to me. What you can do is I can copy the URL of that card and then I just paste it over here. And you can see I get a mini view of this card where I can see, okay, so it's dependent on this card. So I need to keep track of this. It hasn't been started yet. Brittany's working on it. It's due then. This is the list it's in, et cetera. So it's a good way to kind of keep track of related tasks. And they don't even have to be in the same board. You can link to this card that's in another board or however you want to organize that. So that's a really nice way to do that. And then I mentioned the locations where you can view your cards in a map view. And all you need to do is add an actual address on here. I'm going to add let's see. Let's think of some. Let's try to find the space needle loop in Seattle, Washington. So now if I want, click board and just click this map view, you can see all of your cards by where they fall in that location. And so it's a nice way to visualize if you have like maybe you're working on launching some locations of a franchise or something like that. It's a great way to be able to visualize what that looks like if you're interested in that geo data. And then lastly, within these cards, let's say you're like, ah, these fields are great, but I actually want to be able to add another field in here that I don't see. Like maybe you want to keep track of, you know, has this been approved or not? Well, you can use custom fields and make your own field. So you can make a date field. You can make a text field, check box, number, whatever you want it to be. If you want to keep track of, you know, maybe story points, you can say, you know, this is estimated to be three points worth or whatever. You can just create your field here and make it whatever you'd like it to be. I'm going to let's say we're going to go with the number and do story points. And for those who aren't familiar, that's an agile concept where you assign a number to what the amount of work you think a task is going to be. So if you check this show field in front of card, then it's actually going to show it on the card without you having to click into it. And I'll show you what that looks like. So first of all, we've created that field. Let's go ahead and assign it a value. We'll say three. And now you can see it shows here and says story points three right on the front of the card. You don't even have to click into it to see that. So this is kind of the ins and outs of Trello, the workflow of the how to of how it all looks and works. I really like it because this board view kind of lets me have my zoomed out view. I can kind of see mile high what's going on, what's in flight, what all are we doing. But I can also zoom in to be able to see the specifics I need about any sort of task by clicking into a card and seeing all the files, the subtasks, any related cards or location or any other data that's associated with it. It makes it super handy. So that's really nice. Another thing you can do with cards is use them to kind of style your board and make it easier to read for others. So for instance, this card right here, it's just a text card that I added a cover to. And you can see the difference of how it looks based on how you organize the covers to kind of help you have different sections in your card. Sorry, in your board, if you want to provide different information or have different sections within your board. So that's sort of one way it works. You can also apply some automation. So for instance, you may have noticed that anytime I add a card, it automatically assigns a label called not started. And I use Trello automation to do that. I'm not going to cover that in detail because that would be its own course in and of itself and a whole talk that I could do. But basically, you can automate a lot of these actions that you find in here. So that's super easy to do in your automation section. But another cool thing about your views in this board is the filter views. And so remember, I mentioned it's really important to assign people or labels and things. And that's because you can view your board by those sort of things. So let's say it's end of the week, and I want to see what I've accomplished this week. I can say cards assigned to me with a label of done. And I haven't done anything. I should do something. Let's say I've done this one. The not started label. Again, you can add automation so that when you add done, not started goes away or however you'd want to do that. But you can say done. And so now I'm able to see, all right, well, here's what I accomplished this week. You can remove the members. So if you can just need to report back on, okay, what actually moved forward in this project this week? Okay, well, these things, this is what's done. And you can see what you've got left to do. So it's a great way to see that and to be able to organize your workflows. You can also customize a few other pieces of your board. So if you go over to these settings, you can change your background to any custom color, or sorry, to any color, any photo, or any custom photo. You can't actually customize the colors unless you were to, I guess, add your own custom color background, which you could do. So you can make it anything you've previously uploaded, or search for some other cool pictures in here as well. And you can also take your board to the next level with power-ups. So if you click on these power-ups, these are basically these third-party integrations that I was telling you about that you can incorporate with your Trello board. So if you're using some other tools, maybe you're using Jira or GitHub, you can use these different integrations to sync that data back and forth. And one of the ones that's really cool, you see that Unito has a bunch of different ones. It's a great way to mirror data. So for instance, let's say your engineering team works in GitHub, but you want to work in Trello. You can use Unito to set up syncs between those tools. So when something happens in GitHub, it actually updates over here in Trello. So you might have noticed that I actually have this engineering list over here. When I create a new issue on GitHub, it will create a new card over here, and it syncs over all the same data. And you can set that up with Unito pretty easily. So that's really handy. I encourage you to check those out. And there's even a section of IT and project management-specific power-ups that will help your Trello boards be even better. So it'll just unlock more features and things like Gantt charts or different sort of things that you might want to see if you're tracking time or if you need burndown charts or any additional reporting. This is a great, great place to be able to do that. And speaking of reporting, one more thing I want to show you in here is your dashboard view of the board, which lets you visualize your board by how your cards are grouped in terms of labels, how many cards are in each list, when they're due, and cards per member. And so it's a great way to be able to quickly report back out on things that are going on in your project. But again, there's power-ups that let you do even more advanced reporting than this if you'd like. And one last thing I want to show, if you are managing multiple projects, you could put them all on one board, or you could have one board that shows all of your projects. So it's very easy to, if you want to add a board, all you have to do is copy the link and then paste it in there, and it actually shows a little thumbnail of the board. You click it, it goes straight to the board. So you could have just one board of all of your boards, or you could have a list and use Unido and have all the cards sync from all of the individual boards into one main board. But I don't entirely recommend that because if you're trying to see everything at a high-level view and just bring all the cards together, if they're in the same workspace, what you actually want to do is use the workspace table tool. And what that does is it lets you select all of the different boards that you want to see tasks in. And from there, you can use similar filters to what I was showing you on the board. So let's say, for instance, you need to see, okay, what is due for me this week? You can look across all your boards, say, cards assigned to me due in the next week. And boom, now you've got your to-do list for the week. You know exactly what you're doing, what's up, and where it needs to happen. And when you're ready to go update something on those cards, click in onto them, and you can jump in and do exactly what you want, add any specific notes, or whatever you want to sort of do with that. So yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up here, but if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Here's my Twitter handle again, in case when you saw it before, you were like, I don't know that I'm really going to want to talk to her. And now you're like, okay, she's actually kind of cool. I might want to reach out to her. Feel free to. You can find links in my Twitter bio for all of these things with my newsletter, my YouTube channel. Like I said, love to nerd out about productivity and Trello. So hope to see you around. I'm definitely going to be in the after party. So please come reach out to me, bring me your questions, and I hope to see you there.