Event project management made easy with Trello
Onboarding the suspicious & already enlightened alike in a music event project.
I’ve always envied my wife for her ability to immediately scan a situation, location, relation between many things happening at the same time. She gets in and sees the big picture — bam!
It’s that she can, and I can’t, and it inspires me to try to find ways to catch up and match it somehow.
Enter computers, apps, things I can adapt to or customize myself, and the quest has been going on for years. I needed, in my case, the right digital tool, specially when I’m involved in group projects.
As an operation developer at a Sensus study association in Sweden, I’m joined by around 40 coworkers in our regional department. We’ve been, until very recently, using email as a primary communication, and every team could decide on how they’d want to work with each different project.
We are based in a region of Southern Sweden that’s some 14.000 km² in size and our offices are spread in 5 cities. The music team I’m working with consists of 4 coworkers at 4 of those offices.
Finding the right tool for the business
In our team we’re of various levels of computer skills and interests, some are less prone than others to adapt new tools and ways of work, and it was a real challenge when we were about to start a large music project called “Manifest On Tour”. The four “in house” people and between 2–4 external associates were involved, getting the grip over 30+ applications from bands/acts wanting to participate. The project involved a live event at a venue and lots of logistics, technical stuff, catering, marketing, you name it.
I went online and looked for a tool that’s visual, that gives an honest overview of a project and isn’t difficult to learn to use. Trello felt like a natural choice.
Onboarding the suspicious
At our company we’re welcoming diversity and we’re trying to be inclusive in everything we do. We encourage collaboration in order to remain competitive and keep up with the “new digital”. All our processes have a learning and empowering perspective for everybody involved. The individual coworkers and project groups should grow their potentials in everything they do, they need to be able to explain it and share further on. We believe we’re having an inspiring culture here. Within it, there’s a huge potential for the tech adoption, the tech that both inspires and facilitates all the processes. I felt that Trello went well with all this, it was only a matter of finding the right measure of everything setup wise.
So how do we Trello-empower our diverse group of “paper & pen” people, tech naturals (humble me), those “in between”, and absolutely everybody already up to their necks in everyday work demands?
- Start early with the whole project
- Don’t make this new tool a “must”, say “we’ll try it”…
- Have one person do the initial setup / layout of the board, then discuss the final layout and setup
- Start easy and simple
- Show how things are done with own example
- Find a respectful way of onboarding everybody
- Bring in one coworker at a time
- Let them look around and come with input.
We learned that the notifications when something happened in the project board and in the cards, were actually welcomed in this first period of using Trello. What usually annoys, or at least, interrupts people, the notifications about emails, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… was OK here. I asked around and it was the user’s level of engagement that didn’t make notifications annoying. Everyone was interested in what the others voted for, how we were doing at different project stages and so on.
As the “Trello manager” in this music project, I was careful where to assign people to cards so that they don’t feel overwhelmed. After that they’ve seen and acted within the assigned cards, we agreed on removing them from there. This made their “Trello Dashboards”, the “My cards” view, more pleasant and welcoming. Of course, in other businesses, it would be more appropriate to leave the cards assigned but marked as “done”, all in order to have a good follow up in the process. Maybe we’ll be implementing this later on, as we grow in the platform.
We collaborated as a team mostly in the beginning and while listening to all applications from our acts. The team needed to look only into one list, the one with some 30+ cards with applications. Everything we needed to know about the acts was in their respective cards — bios, Spotify, Soundcloud or Basecamp links, photos, and each member would write their thoughts in the comments sections of the cards. This worked like charm.
After reading and listening to all the acts, we commented in the cards of the acts we thought were interesting. What a great option in Trello — that we can embed a YouTube video link in the comments and watch right from the opened card, then we can jot down what we think…
Sparingly with the Power-Ups if you’re just starting
We used the Calendar Power-Up for the good overview of various due dates during the preparations, Google Drive hosted some of the files, and there were 3 labels in the project: “Done”, “Working on” and “Priority 1”. In our screenshots there are only the labels for “Done” that are visible, we’re writing this several months after the project completion.
The wrap-up halfways through the project
My task was to go through everything, calculate the votings and prepare the final list of acts we’ll be booking.
Later on and up to the date of the live event, the team checked the Trello board only to see what’s done and to help with some additional marketing.
All information about our acts was grouped in the first 2–3 lists from the left in the Trello board.
What have we at Sensus Study Association learned from this first project in Trello?
We are a quite traditional company. We’re not only paper & pen, of course, but we still have real meetings, we travel across the region to meet. We spend time together the old way and we have a very charitable relations to each other. Lots of working spaces don’t have it and we don’t want to lose it.
At the same time we need to catch up. We’re using video conferencing more and more, and we believe that there’s a need for an online place where everybody can go, get a good grip over what we’re doing and how — and participate easily if needed. Our new way of working in teams where the members can be located all around the region created a need for more efficient workflow and communication.
Trello has proven that it can definitely boost this and initiate the collaboration even in those “solo” projects that could evolve into team assignments. We have started to make smaller Trello boards with planning, sketching future projects, the boards where everyone is invited to participate with ideas and so on. We’re now using it with our instrument teaching projects where all details regarding our courses reside on it’s own board.
It’s new, it’s welcoming, we’re optimistic.
The Sensus Music team’s Trello Roadmap:
- Onboarding the rest of the employees besides us and helping them with our experience
- Starting using more Power-Ups
- Sending emails directly to the boards
- Making Trello the first stop every day even before we check our mail inboxes
About our music project: Manifest On Tour is a workshop- and showcase tour where experts from various parts of music business share their knowledge and experience. We want to offer musicians, artists, creators, composers and others an opportunity to get to know more about music branch and to establish new contacts.
It is arranged in the cooperation of SOM (Sweden’s Independent Music Producers), Sensus Study Association and the Swedish Musician Union.
Written by Dragan ´Homesick Mac´ Ruzic, Musician, Teacher, and Consultant Based in Sweden
Learn more about Sensus Study Association
Access this text in Swedish
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