Is there a way to organize interdependent projects?

Adam Snyder_eiygk3

I run a research lab, and there are two sensible ways to think about our projects. 1) each research subject needs to go through a sequence of steps, and 2) each experiment needs several research subjects to go through it (among other things). So, for example, I might want to know "what's the status with Experiment A?" and see that we're waiting for subject 1 to complete it. Or maybe I want to know what subject 2 is working on. Ideally, it would be nice to move a card in one board and have it update "everywhere" (like, on a board for Subject 1 I could move a card for 'experiment A' from "doing" to "done", and that would also move a 'subject 1' card from "doing" to "done" on the board for 'experiment A'). Does Trello support this sort of thing? How would I implement that? Is there some other way to think about this that's not even occurring to me? I'm trying to get a grip on our project management and I've never used anything like Trello before, so this is all really puzzling to me right now...

Brittany Joiner

@Adam Snyder welcome to the fun world of project management tools! I think the beautiful thing about Trello is its a bunch of lego blocks so you can build just about whatever you want with it. The downside is that means sometimes means its a little confusing to know just what exactly to do 😂

As far as what you're asking about with updating one board and it reflecting on another, we call that "mirroring" and Trello has mentioned that they'll have some in-app functionality with this at some point, but for now, you'll need to use something like the Unito Power-Up (add on that you can find in the Power-Ups section), or build something out with Zapier that says if something happens in one board, update x in another board. I recommend going with Unito, it's going to cost but it's out of the box exactly what you're looking for there in terms of mirroring.

As far as set up, I prefer to personally keep as much in one board as I can. So for example, I might think of each research subject as a label, and each cards as an experiment. So in the situation where you want to see how experiment A is progressing, you could just apply a filter to label to only show A on your board, and then you could see cards for all the related experiments and which list/stage they are in.

Like this: 

And then you can add checklists inside each subject , and you can also make your list names a little more descriptive to give more context to which parts of the stage they're in. For example maybe it's hypothesis --> runnings tests --> reviewing results , etc.