Dev Blog — Moving away from Trello
When it comes to software development it is critical to operate in an agile fashion. This is the mindset that is drilled into each and every one of us as we learn our stacks and we work with teams. Our team is no exception, but sadly as we all have day jobs, and we all have outside responsibilities we are not able to fully move into that space. Instead, we have had to get creative.
Currently, this project is a portfolio piece for all of us, an outrageously ambitious one, that has a substantial potential to evolve into a monetized project long-term. That said we each have tasks outside of this project that has to be addressed. Job search moving into our industries, interviews, and maintaining our current job responsibilities. Additionally, our team spans 4 time zones, and it is unrealistic to expect a stand-up daily. Ideally, that would be a thing, but with the way things are at this moment, our team burns through as much as possible and gets things done at their own pace. That is not to say that there are not timelines that are being implemented, and being pushed for.
So in the spirit of the Agile Methodology, we have added a daily retrospective form, and we have migrated from Trello to ClickUp. Trello does a ton of things right, but there are gaps that can to a degree be made up with powerups and other additional subscriptions, but for a startup, or a not-yet-for profit project. Instead, we are able to leverage better organizational, and agile features with the Clickup Platform.
Card (task) scoring. Understanding the velocity at which our team is able to perform is critical, more than other projects I would argue. Due to the part-time nature of this project for most of our team at this point having access to this information to more accurately gauge performance, and be able to rapidly adjust planning, and workload balancing between team members allows for us to move from task to task more productively, while at the same time shoring up any potential shortfalls on potentially blocking tasks.
We recruited an all-star team, and because of that, we have to expect that very rapidly each team member will end up in a new job in the industry rapidly. So we had to account for them getting ramped up with their stack at their new employment, ensure that we were not overloading them, and generally ensure that they were able to do what they needed to do to be successful. That is the goal at this point outside of the project, to be a vehicle to leverage for each team member to be as successful in their endeavors as possible.
The next feature that really stood out was a fairly decent mix of the features of both Jira and Trello, and being able to individually change our views to better suit us, the team members. For example, while I am good with Trello, I have far more time using Jira & Asana where tasks are in a list view, instead of a card view, and being that I come from the sales industry a lot of CRMs leverage list views. So I personally can glean a ton off of a list view more quickly than I would be able to with a card view.
Analytics. This goes back to the card scoring. Soon we will likely jump to a higher tier paid subscription to utilize burndown charts and other analytical features that ClickUp natively offers with its tool. These again go to driving the team in an efficient, and viable way.
In closing, Take a look at all of the tools around, and figure out what is best for you and your team, while Trello and Jira tend to be the most popular, each and every team works better or worse with different tools. Understand your team, and ensure that you are effectively guiding your team to success instead of straight into a disorganized disaster area.
I am excited to be talking about the project, and soon we will start talking about the brand, the logo, and other cosmetic things so stay tuned!
