Project Tools for Teams
Increasing team productivity and project transparency with free online tools
Written by John Owen and Cath Wasiuk
In this post, we share how we used Airtable, Trello, Zapier and Slack to manage a curriculum design project using an Agile approach. We demonstrate how we used these tools to develop an online course with students as partners and how we integrated and automated the technologies to support our workflow, with the aim of increased team productivity and project transparency.
Introduction to the project
This project began when we were approached by an academic with an idea for a hackathon to develop an open-access course on Antimicrobial Resistance with undergraduate students. We work in a multidisciplinary teaching and research hub focussing on data science and public health. Part of our role is to develop short online open-access courses to introduce current health-related subjects to the general public. The hub team adopt an Agile approach to developing teaching materials, which can be challenging in traditional Higher Education structures and processes.
Developing a new approach
We applied our agile team working principles to this student partnership project resulting in a new approach we called micro-sprints. We then identified a range of free, cloud-based tools to support our workflow with the aim of increasing team productivity and project transparency
The new process has less reliance on:
- Spreadsheets and heavy documentation
- Linear approaches to managing projects, where one step has to end before another can begin
- Developing materials in Word, Excel, PPTs on a shared drive
And more focus on:
- Iteration and improvement
- Opportunities for discussion and feedback
- Collaboration with students
- Capturing data quickly and easily
We identified 4 free tools to integrate and support our new way of working. The tools needed to be democratic, transparent, easily accessible, user-friendly, current, and easy to set up.
Airtable is an online hybrid spreadsheet/database tool. Airtable was used to capture the data and requirements of the project through customised forms. Team reflections on the process were captured at the end of each session, to improve the process for the next session.
Zapier is a process automation tool and can move data between web apps. Zapier was used to move data from Airtable to Trello.
Trello is a collaborative project management tool. Zapier pushes data from Airtable to Trello, creating tasks (Trello cards) in to-do lists. The Trello board was set up in a Kanban structure to track the progress of the project and assign tasks to team members.
Slack is a collaboration and communication tool. A Trello channel in Slack showed any activity from the project’s Trello board via a Slack/Trello integration. Other channels in Slack supported project communication and collaboration.
At the end of each micro-sprint, the team reflected on the process, focusing on what went well and what didn’t go so well. The reflections were captured through an Airtable form. This enabled us to create actions for the next micro-sprint to continually improve the process.
As you can see in the team reflections below, technology has contributed to an iterative increase in team productivity and project transparency.
“The use of Trello and Slack helped tremendously on dividing and agreeing what each of us will do at each sprint.”
“I liked the idea of logging tasks on Trello as it allows us to keep organised and on top of things.”
“I found Trello and Slack to be excellent platforms for communication and allowed all members to keep on top of which stage of development we were at, even for sessions that were missed.”
“The use of Trello and Slack made it easy for people to keep track of the project and jump in and out. It also allowed individuals to work remotely if unable to attend sessions.”
Next steps
The University of Manchester is currently rolling out Microsoft Office 365 for its staff and students and we are exploring how we can use the Teams app to replicate and further develop our approach to working with students. We like the tools we’ve been using but believe Microsoft Teams provides a great opportunity to embed and integrate our team-based approach into Learning and Teaching practice at the University.
