Project management tips for agile marketing using Trello

- [Brad] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Weekly Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and this week I wanna discuss how to use Trello for managing your marketing projects. Now, Trello is an online tool that essentially lets you manage visual lists. You'll add tasks, notes, or files as a card, and then you stick that card into a list. But lists on their own aren't all that great for managing projects, as they don't give you immediate visibility into where the priorities are, what the status of various initiatives are, and what things need immediate attention. Now, I practice Agile marketing, which, in a nutshell, treats marketing as an iterative process, one that is always responding to change versus following a concrete plan. It gives you the flexibility to respond to unpredictability, and it allows teams to be nimble, keeps everyone focused, and it naturally creates an environment where the highest priority issues are being worked on. So how do you manage that in an effective manner? For me, I use Trello, and I set it up like this. I will have five lists, a Backlog, a To Do, Doing, For Review, and Done. Every time I have an idea, a project falls onto my plate, someone on my team comes up with something, we put it into the Backlog. This is simply a way to get the ideas out of your head and into a list. From there, at the end of each week, I will go through and groom the Backlog. I'll review all the items in the list, and I will drag them into a priority order that I think makes the most sense. From there, I'll meet with the team each week, the beginning of the week, and select which items from the Backlog will move into the To Do column. And these are all of the items that I hope to have accomplished say in the next week, or it could be two weeks or more. But the idea is this list is always moving. So we might agree to do a few items. From here, I can assign each of these cards to someone on the team or myself. Anything that's being worked on is moved into the Doing column. This makes it very easy on any given day to see what everyone is up to. When you work with teams on Trello, you'll see the team member that's associated to the card, so it's easy to get a quick glance of what's going on. When things are done, they move into For Review. And typically I'll have the card reassigned to whoever needs to review the item. When it passes review, it's moved to Done. If it fails review, it's moved back to To Do. That means you should be picking up items from the To Do list and moving them back through the flow. What's great is you can also use labels to help differentiate various statuses. In this case I used an Enterprise label and a Consumer label to differentiate whether the project is B2B or B2C. If I choose Show Menu in the upper right hand corner, I can select Filter Cards and I could look at just Enterprise tasks, Consumer tasks, or I've also created a state called Blocked. And in this case, if a task becomes blocked, you can set it to Blocked and assign it to the person who's responsible for unblocking it, or leave a note indicating what has to happen to unblock that task from moving forward. Now this isn't the only way to organize your projects, but this is what I use in my workflow, and I find that it's incredibly effective. I encourage you to give it a shot, and evolve it for your needs. Thanks for checkin' in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So, connect with me on LinkedIn, or reach out to me on Twitter via @bradbatesole and let me know how you manage your projects. I'll see you next week.