TL;DR: The Community Team is great at managing daily operations but sometimes we lose the “big picture” and things fall between the cracks. Enter Project Management!
The topic of project management has surfaced a few times in the past couple of years.
During Contributor Day at WordCamp US 2018 a group of people (Christina Workman – @amethystanswers, Dean Burton – @burtondean, Javier Ontiveros – @javo01, Ken Mick – @kengmick, Ray Mitchell – @raym, Stacey CC DePolo) worked on a first proposal for a workflow and in the past few days @sippis and I reviewed it.
After a bit of back and forth and some trial and error, we are ready to start using the Trello board for the Community Team!
Project Management through Trello
Trello is a free project management tool based on kanban boards. In its simplest form you have three columns with three status: To Do, Doing, and Done.
Each team that uses kanban boards usually comes up with different ways of leveraging them, including some very complex use cases.
We tried to keep it simple enough to be easy to use for as many people as possible, but customised it to the team’s needs.
Why Trello: a SWOT Analysis
| Strengths 1) Tool – Free – User friendly – Mobile apps – Browser based 2) Processes The Community Team is busy busy busy. Sometimes we get so busy with the daily stuff (vetting, orientations, invoicing, payments, etc…) that we don’t keep an eye on the bigger picture. Trello will help us do that. – Team work – Work progress – Multiple projects under the same roof (working groups can add a board) |
Weakness 1) Tool – Browser based – you can’t use it when you are offline like Google Docs and then sync when you have a connection – Limited in terms of functionality if you are a professional project manager 2) Processes – People need to be added to the boards to be able to edit, comment, etc… – New tool to learn |
| Opportunities 1) Tool – Add-ons to make the worflow even more efficient 2) Processes – It allows new contributors to pick a project and join the team that is working on it without being a deputy – It allows existing contributors that have been out of the loop to go back to working actively on projects |
Threats 1) Tool – Not open source, might disappear into the void – Might become a fully paid tool in the future. There is nothing pointing that any of the above will happen, but you never know… 2) Processes – Change can be met with resistance – Not enough buy-in from senior members of the team – Logging activity in Trello rather than on the team blog adds another level of complexity to deputy reporting |
After doing this SWOT analysis it looks like it’s a good idea to try it for real. Especially since we are aware of the threats we can self-correct over time 😉
Suggestions for a smoother adoption
Define the scope
Trello is not for daily activities (vetting, orientations, payments, invoicing, mediation, quizzes, etc…) nor for Community Organisers to organise their events.
Trello is for:
- time and scope defined projects
- one or more people working on it
Working Groups are a great example, because they are very focused and need all the members to be updated, whether they are present during the biweekly chats or not.
Commit to the experiment
From now to December 31st, we kindly ask you to give Trello a proper chance. It means that if you are working on anything Community related you should use our public board to keep track of the project so everyone can be informed and join.
Make it part of our team chats
We should introduce the board at our meetings as the tool we use to work on projects.
This is an example how the Marketing team does it, and it’s a great way to reinforce how useful Trello is for everyone:
Trial Period
We will use Trello until the end of the year. If by December 31st 2019 we see that this tool has actually slowed down projects or became a roadblock for new contributors, we will discontinue it.
What does success look like?
- Everything that is non daily operation is documented in the Trello board.
- We keep the board updated (even by moving projects into the Backlog column) so people that haven’t been active for a while or are looking for a way to contribute to Community can pick up a task and go with it.
- Every proposal that we post in the blog and is met with enthusiasm is turned into a project card in Trello so we know that something happened after we said “What a great idea!”
- 100% buy-in from all the Community Team
- 100% buy-in from new contributors that understand that this is part of the on-boarding.
Next steps and call for feedback
To ensure adoption we need these processes to be clear, understandable, and useful.
- Please check the guidelines in the Column “👇👇👇 START HERE 👇👇👇”. Do they make sense? Do you think it’s a good workflow to start with?
- Explore the projects in the “To Do” and “In Progress” columns. Do they make sense when you see them in action?
- Add your project, no matter how simple or complex it might be. Ask in #community-events or #community-team to be added to the board (an unfortunate feature if the software). You need a Trello account to join.
- How do you think we should integrate the board in our meetings?
Thank you for reading all of this!