What is/are the best powerups to filter and report on many projects by attribute?

Question

Hello everyone,

New Trello business class user here, working to set up Trello to support our PMO.  We are a small team that tracks and manages many projects (100+) that people across our organization are involved with.  Apologies in advance for the long question, I'll try to give relevant details. I have two things I'm hoping to do:

1. I'd like the ability to create reports (GANTT charts and summaries in particular) on all and some of our projects.  For example, I'd like to be able to look only at the 20 projects that Accounting is involved with, or only those that were started at a particular process retreat, etc.  I think Placker might be the right way to go with this (Big picture doesn't seem to have any ability to show only a subset of projects). - thoughts?

2. I'd also like to be able to use Trello to view and report on demands on specific people who are not Trello users.  We have 20 licenses which have gone out to our project managers to use the tool.  However, there are ~50-80 people who are involved in projects.  I'd like to be able to, for any given project, make an attribute of all the people involved, and then be able to view the aggregate project demands by person for the whole firm.  Ideally, I'd like to do this without having to make Trello accounts for every person because they won't use the tool.  Custom fields per person seems like a clunky way to do this - is there a way to basically have a directory of non-users that I can some/all members of to a card?

Apologies if the above is not clear.  By way of background:

* we are currently organizing our projects onto one project list board
* We use lists to organize project status (eg. in progress, not started, completed, etc.)
* Each project is a card
* A Project Request Form on SharePoint that folks submit automatically creates cards.  
* We use Labels to track attributes such as "projects in need of approval" or "Projects created in the process retreat" - my question 1 is about reporting on these subsets.
* We use custom fields to capture information about projects, such as departments involved, sponsorship, etc.
* The plan is to assign projects to project managers (with Trello Accounts) and give each their own board, where their cards would be mirrored.  They can then track and update their projects on their boards which will update on the master list for reporting.

Ultimately we'd like to provide transparency for leadership into what projects are going on across the firm, who is doing them, and what their status is.  We'd also like to have a convenient tool to manage projects ourselves (eg Trello), and so ideally want the reporting to aggregate relevant information for leadership based on the real-time status of those projects.

Any advice would be welcome.  Thank you!

milynnus · Accepted Answer

@Adam Tohn on Q2 you can have the 50-80 non Trello people exist as cards on a reference board. Attach a card to the project. Maintain the assignment of the non-Trello users as cardlinks in a checklist. Use Butler collect card if your 50-80 people can be organised with labels. Maintenance will, however, be needed. There are possibly other ways to handle this.

Iain Dooley · Accepted Answer

@Adam Tohn firstly, use Placker and assign things to people based on label. Placker has a great gantt charting view that allows you to slice up across all boards using labels so you can use it for resource planning even though each of those people won't have Trello accounts.

Secondly, for your "board of boards", that's actually the scenario I use as an example in this article introducing the Trellinator Google Apps Script library:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

For example, when a form is submitted and card created, you could use something similar to automatically create the project board, link it to the card, and then the project board might inherit some functionality like posting comments back to the overview card each time a new card is moved to the "Done" list and so on.