Using Trello as a company-wide Production System

[Cam Nealie]

Hey Trello team!

I'm looking for feedback on a new production system we're likely to roll out soon...

I'm the operations manager for a Content Marketing agency, we have a staff of around 50 and work with between 150 and 200 clients at a time. When we bring clients onboard, we set them up with a specific number of 'units',  and we work with them in order to spend those units on what we make. A 400 word article would cost 4 unts, an infographic 6 units, and so on. It's a pretty extensive menu we offer, and involves several separate teams: editorial, graphic design, digital marketing & social media, digital strategy, and video. 

Our account managers come up with a plan in order to use those units most effectively, but we can also handle changes to that plan because we know we can swap out an upcoming infographic for an article, or a UX report for an SEO report, and track the change in 'units' instead of invoices.

Up until now we've handled resourcing those teams, briefing projects, and tracking 'unit delivery' via a series of fairly complicated spreadsheets, that ultimately end up in a database. However, I've mocked up a much simpler version in Trello that we're considering swapping to, and I'd love some feedback. Basically, I just want to know if I'm re-inventing the wheel here! If there's a better way to do this, I'm all ears!

First, we work with our customers and come up with a plan for the next 3-6 months of deliverables, and we outline how many units this will cost. Once the plan is agreed to, we enter that information into the system via the Client Content Plan Trello Board. Every client has one (and only one), and each deliverable has it's own card. The Unit Price is a custom field on that card, along with the Home Board Id (the ID of the Content Plan Trello board, this will be important later as these cards need to return back to their 'home') and the end-deliverable URL. That is, the URL that shows us what we actually made in the end.

Each Content Plan Trello Board has at minimum two lists: "To Add to Next Sprint" and "Done".  I have a timed "validation" script running on Google Apps Script connected to the Trello API that makes sure that the required lists and custom fields are on every board.

In the run-up to the next sprint, every card in list called "To add to next sprint" gets the board name added to the front of the card title, the home-board ID gets added to the custom field, and the entire card is moved to the Editorial Sprint Trello Board, under the "backlog" column. This, is also done via the API.

At the beginning of the sprint, the editorial team goes through that list of deliverables (quite a big list so they'll use filters to split up the work). They'll assign themselves to cards, insert story points by adding them in brackets to the card title, and move any cards that don't involve them (such as a strategy report) into the appropriate teams sprint board.

As they complete those tasks, they move them down to the end of the sprint board, until they're in the "Database" list. At the end of the sprint, another API script takes all cards in a list called "Database" and returns it to the board it came from (by checking the "Home Board" custom field).

That way, we can track everything we'd like to start and everything we have completed in a Content Plan Trello Board.

There are a few extra details - there's three editorial teams so I'm using Board Tags to separate out what-goes-where in that initial movement of cards, and I'm using some Chrome extensions to help view story points nicely, but for the most part, that's the whole system.

So - am I completely wasting my time here? Is this something someone else has already done better? I don't want to swap out one custom-made system (on spreadsheets) for another custom-made system (in Trello) that has the same problems. Those problems being complexity, confusion, key-man risk in troubleshooting, inflexibility with changes, multiple scripts... etc.

I appreciate this is a bit of an essay so any help or push in the right direction is appreciated!

[Marta Galofre de Alos]

Hi Cam,

Thanks so much for sharing this!

Would you mind contacting us at trello.com/contact and granting us access to your account? I'd be more than happy to take a look at how you've got Trello set up right now and further discuss how to best implement it in your agency! Let me know :)