Managing editorial teams with Trello

- [Instructor] Throughout this course, I've walked you through how to begin building your entire creative editorial workflow using my favorite program, Trello. If you haven't reviewed those videos yet, then I suggest you check them out first so that the tips that I demonstrate in this video make more sense. And as always, if you want to dive much deeper, you can always check out my full course, Trello for Video Post Production. Now, up until this point, in the weekly lessons, I've only demonstrated how to build an individual workflow, but now I want to help you understand how you can organize your entire editorial team to use the same boards that you have created for yourself. Having seen this workflow in action for several years now, I can confidently warn you, once your team sees how this works, everybody is going to want to know how to do it, so be prepared. So, you'll see that we are here at the Trello Home page and I have added a new board called the Move Yourself Video Vault. I'm going to show you how I built a video library of over 100 individual videos with a team of seven different people, all of which were remote. Nobody was local and there was no central office, and our communication was streamlined, it was efficient, and the process was really, really simple. So, first what I want to do is before opening this board, I want to show you the finished product because sometimes it can help you to reverse engineer something and understand how all of it goes together, then I'm going to explain how it was organized on the Trello board and how I manage my teams and manage team communication. So, here is what I call the Move Yourself Activity Video Vault. This is a library of a bunch of short videos that are designed for people that are sedentary all day long to help them reduce pain, increase mobility, and level up their energy and focus in minutes without ever having to leave their desk. So, you'll see that there are three main libraries to this, there's something called the Energy and Focus Library, the Pain Relief and Mobility Library that is designed by a licensed chiropractor, and an Office Yoga Library. So, I'm just going to click into these really, really quickly. So, the Energy and Focus Library just happens to be some guy that looks kind of like me. So, there are some videos to help you level up your focus and your energy at your desk. If I go back, go to the Pain Relief and Mobility Library, this is led by Dr. Sadie Sanders who designed all of the videos in the different categories. So, if I just go into one of the categories, let's go into Acute and Chronic Pain, you can see that there's a whole bunch of videos inside here. And then if I go back one more time to the main library and to the Office Yoga Library, you can see that there's a whole bunch of videos here that are different office yoga routines that are led by Ally Hamilton. So, the reason I showed you this is so you understand the Trello board better. So, trying to manage this many videos via email would be nearly impossible. There were over 100 videos in this vault with seven different editors working all remotely, communication would have been a nightmare, however, with Trello, it was incredibly simple. So, here is how I manage the board for a team. All I had to do was create one Trello card per video and each video goes into a list which corresponds to the category as its organized in the video vault. So, the way that I've organized this for a team is, I first create a General Info and Workflow list that has team guidelines, it has post workflows, anything that people need to know when they start. If I were to bring on a brand new team member, this is kind of like home base. So, if I scroll down here, it has all the Picture Delivery Specs, the Sound Delivery Specs, how we organize our media, what the Final Delivery Specs are. So, this way, everybody knows exactly what's expected of them and they know how to deliver, they know how to export, everything is set out very, very cleanly so I don't have to get 15 different emails asking the same questions. All of the questions are answered here. And then we have each list as a corresponding category, so we have the Introductory Videos, Explanation Videos and so on, going all the way over here. If I were to scroll to the right, you can see that these cards just keep going. Most importantly, though, I want you to understand how team communication works. So, now you see in general how I organized a Trello board to manage so many different videos, but now the question is, how do I manage all of the people? So, it's very, very simple. All you have to do is make sure that your team members are added to your board. So, for example, I'm the only technical team member because Optimize Yourself is a team on Trello and in order for me to add all of these people as permanent team members would, unfortunately, cost an additional amount for the monthly fee, but I can add non-team members for no fee whatsoever and because these are all independent contractors and they're only working on this board, there's no reason that I need to officially add them as part of my Trello team and increase my monthly fee. So, these are all of the different team members that are communicating on this board with me and all I have to do, if I want to add somebody else, is click Invite and I either add their Trello name or I can invite them directly using their email. So, now once I have my members on this board, they can see all of this information, but this is really, really overwhelming for somebody that's only contracted to, maybe, edit, I don't know, five videos. They don't want to see 100 of these videos, so what I want to do is assign members to individual cards so they know what they're responsible for and what they're not responsible for. So, for example, if I go to the Radiating Neck Pain video, for example, and I just chose that 'cause every once in a while I have radiating neck pain, what I want to do is go Add Members. I can search any of the member that I want and I just happen to add my assistant editor, Chris Visser. So, now he is a member of this card because he helped to edit this video, and you can see that I also have him on the Team Communication and Guidelines, the Post Workflow Guidelines. But let's say that I'm Chris, right now I'm not the team manager, I am now Chris and I have come to this board and I want to strip away all the noise and I don't want to have to worry about what other people are doing. I just want to know, what should I look at? Well, that couldn't be easier. What I'm going to do is I'm going to filter this board by cards in which I'm attached as a member, and there's two ways to do this. The long was is to go to Show Menu and go down to Filter Cards. You can see that I can filter by member, but I'm going to show you the hotkey. This is the way that I like to do it. All I simply need to do is click the F key and it brings up the exact same menu, and now I want to filter by all the cards with my name because I'm Chris Visser, and guess what? All I need to be responsible for is understanding the Final Delivery Specs, knowing the Post Workflow, knowing the Picture Delivery, and I'm only assigned to this Radiating Neck Pain video and nothing else. So, all of a sudden my workload became way less overwhelming, which is going to make it a lot easier for me to focus on the tasks that are mine. So, now that I understand which tasks are mine and which belong to other team members, now I want to be able to communicate. So, when it comes to communicating when you have a team, the way that I like to explain it, and I also explain this in more detail in my full Trello for Video Post Production course, but if you're going to communicate and it's about one specific video, that communication should happen in Trello. So, if it's a specific project, a specific container like a card, whatever it would be, or if you want to have a specific conversation, say, about the Post WorkFlow Guidelines, the Picture Delivery Specs, or the Final Delivery Specs, you would just go ahead and have a conversation right in the Trello card. So, for example, if I had a question, I would use the person's handle just like I would if it were Twitter, for example, do an at sign. So, there's Zack, I would say, hey, I have some questions about your notes. So, I would save that and now we have all of the details of all of our conversations right here in this one card as long as those conversations pertain specifically to the Radiating Neck Pain video. However, if I want to have just a general conversation and for example, say, hey, I know that you expected me to start working on these at noon. Unfortunately something came up, I'm not going to be able to start until a little bit later in the day. Is that going to be a problem? That's general communication, that is not project-specific communication. My recommendation is that you make all of those team communications in Slack, and you'll notice that I didn't say email because I've eliminated email 100% for any internal team members. You can't eliminate email 100% if you're dealing with outside vendors or clients, but internally, you have complete control of your communication workflow. It should be 100% without email. So, project-specific communications are going to happen right inside Trello if it's specific to something like a video, to guidelines, or whatnot, and if it's general internal team communication, my recommendation would be using the program Slack. And if you'll remember, I have a video earlier in this course about the basics of using Slack. So, now that you have your entire team set up on your project boards and you're getting things done together, in a future lesson on Trello, I'm going to show you a really cool and efficient way for you and your team members to track your time that's spent on specific projects or tasks using the really cool web app, Toggle.