Is there a practice for using Trello to manage multiple reports on a cross-functional team?

[Matthew Baggetta]

Hi there,

I am a manager and I have 3 folks on my team. I work alongside another manager who has 5 reports on his team. Our two teams collaborate often.

Currently, I have a personal private board, and each of my 3 team members has a personal board shared with me, and there's also a shared Team board.

The way I'm using Trello to manage our work is: at first my reports will create cards for projects on their board, then if/when the project requires cross-collaboration with the greater team, I move the project card from their private board to the team board so everyone can see it and others can be added to collaborate on it.

The issue is, when there are updates to cards, I'm finding it overwhelming having to check 3 different team boards, my own board and the team board.

Am I using Trello properly? How do others handle this type of situation?

[Iain Dooley]

@Matthew Baggetta this is precisely why I created BenkoBoard, it gives you a better cards view, and also allows you to use Trello for your email:

https://trello.com/integrations/#benkoboard

In this case, cards would go into the shared boards and any time someone is added to a card or mentioned in a comment they get a linked card in their BenkoBoard. It also unwatches any card you're added to so you only get notified about being added to a card, mentioned in a comment and removed from a card which makes the notifications far more usable.

[Matthew Baggetta]

This is not really what I had in mind... My question is about the best way to use Trello with a team, not how to integrate Trello with Gmail. I don't even use Gmail.

[Iain Dooley]

@Matthew Baggetta the email integration isn't the key point I was making for your use case, but rather the bit where all cards you're added to or comments you're mentioned in create a linked card in a personal board, and that it unwatches cards you're added to so you only see notifications about being added/removed/mentioned which makes the notifications less voluminous and more usable.

However quite often what I find is that, unless there are access restriction requirements, the solution to "I am having to check too many boards" is to only have one board, but use labels and member assignments along with the "search cards" feature (formerly called filtering) to give you an "at a glance" view of what you need to look at:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/How-can-I-see-all-my-Trello-cards-in-one-place/ba-p/1050430

Ultimately, though, when things do get to a certain level of operational complication Trello really comes into its own when you free yourself up to use multiple boards, and doing so using Trello's native notifications and cards view has never been ideal.

You can also use tools like Unito and Butler to do some card mirroring/linking, the drawback there is that both solutions can get quite expensive quite quickly, depending on card volume:

https://help.trello.com/article/1097-mirroring-cards

Another tool that's great for overview and planning is Placker, to me this is one that hits the sweet spot between utility and cost because you don't have to pay for licenses for everyone on your team, just the people that do the actual project management. It gives you a good overview of all tasks/due dates and so on, but doesn't do anything with card updates or notifications:

https://placker.com/index.html