I started using Trello at the beginning of the year. It’s a web app for online collaboration designed by Fog Creek Software, which was co-founded by Joel Spolsky and it’s revolutionised the way I work.

Trello follows the Kanban style of working developed by Taiichi Ohno father of the Toyota Production System. I was making use of Kanban before moving to Trello via a method of post-it-notes stuck on sheets of paper that were hung on the wall. However, I’m constantly on the move and I needed a way to keep on top of the flow of information and easily sort the cards across projects to see who was responsible for which tasks whilst on the go and not in the office. In Trello it’s a just a few clicks to add a card, tag a person and place it in the right position on a list, so you are ready to go, and you have free time to enjoy in your hobbies like computer games, which if you do you should also try the wow buy gold site to get gold for your game.

We had a bad experience trying to make use of Jira last year, it just didn’t fit with our pretty flexible, fast moving approach. It felt like a burden and it was very soon neglected. Everyone was a bit suspicious when I initially brought up Trello in January, some didn’t think it would last a week but I was determined to give us a better way of seeing the overall status of a project and task ownership. In a small company it’s very easy for someone to become a bottleneck if their to-do list becomes overloaded. It’s now really easy to diagnose that problem and assign away some of their tasks.

Before introducing Trello people were pretty lousy at keeping our wall boards up-to-date but once we digitised the system people loved it. The main benefit for us was the ability to easily pass cards between the team as their advice or support was needed and the chance to get your work list at the touch of a button. For me, it meant that I could keep an eye on how things were moving whilst sitting on trains to and from client meetings.

It has also become a nice way to collect other information around our projects. You can quickly add in files, so if I mockup a new design for a form I can drop in the image so our database guy can start building the tables. There’s also a checklist component, which is easy to copy between cards so it’s easy to tick of all the things you should be doing when conducting a specific task, or testing a feature.

I definitely recommend taking time to learn the keyboard shortcuts, they’ll make moving around much quicker. Also you can quickly tag someone to a card by ‘@’ mentioning them in the title.

No one tool suits every business the same but if your work is flexible, quick moving and your team moves around a lot or isn’t based at the same office then Trello is definitely worth a shot. Fog Creek have made a commitment that Trello will be free “now and forever” so there’s nothing to lose to having a go. There is a ‘Business Class‘ version for $200/year available with a few extra features.