Trello

Trello is great, it's simple to use, and has loads of clever UX devices that make tracking and updating tasks a joy. We use it quite often within our organisation whenever something needs "organising fast" - we're not expecting to track the progress of the entire project through Trello, but the occasional breakout.

We've most often used Trello to round up our "ideas" phase, and then moved onto a more complex project management tool after that.

The interface is simple, the free level is "about right" and there are just enough features for you to get going quickly.

Trello is great for quick organisational tasks, that need to be presented in a visual way, or they are good for information sharing (literally a pin-board of ideas works well) - and has reduced the need for post-it-notes everywhere in the office.

There comes a point in every Trello boards life when the user will go "ok, now it's time to move this all away from Trello"

Task management is .. laborious at best, with no real way of tracking time, burndowns, productivity, velocity, or any other metric that tells a project manager if the job is "getting done", it's simply not built for that and trying to implement methods that will make it work, just result in frustration.

It's also a bit lightweight on the features for the free trial version, quite a few things are locked off behind the paywall (which is fine) - but also, we feel that there isn't *enough* features behind the paywall which would incentivise us to purchase a license.

So the bottom line with Trello is it's great for short term, simple tasks and idea sharing, but anything more heavy duty that needs to be updated regularly and it will struggle.

Trello, with its built-in board system, gives us a comprehensive view of all project activities, colleague updates, and various alerts. I greatly appreciate Trello's different presentation capabilities, as we can choose from several distinct presentation methods that suit us, which gives us enough flexibility while performing tasks. Trello has tools to collaborate on all the details, especially when creating workflow charts, while updating tasks, and preparing reports. As for automation, it is very useful, as we were able to reflect the effect of updates on the panels directly on the work programs, which helps us to update the closing dates of projects and know the critical activities that affect the workflow automatically.

The user interface of Trello is easy to customize, and all the tools are easy to use, but some members may use the panels incorrectly, and make the updating and follow-up processes somewhat cumbersome, especially for those who work on writing long texts on them.