Trello Kanban like Board for Issues and Tasks Tracking

I was always concerned with handling the various issues and tasks that are related to the IT systems we maintain. I have been experimenting with Trello with my coworkers and I found that using a Kanban like Boards for our organization’s IT issues, was working for us, so I thought I’d write about it.

A Little background

I previously posted a method using gmail as an issue tracking system. While that worked for a while, our IT people simply couldn’t get the hang of using Gmail in a way other that communicating.

I also tried to introduce various tracking systems, especially Redmine but the administration time needed was too high. Also I found that people generally don’t like documenting or keeping track of the progress of our issues or tasks using conventional tracking systems. Maybe it has something to with too many options and buttons on a single page. So even though we were capturing our issues and tasks, categorizing and even solving them relatively easy, we were lacking in documenting the solution or even changing the status of our issues.

Reasons for change

• Issues and tasks were not tracked adequately
• Did not have a clear understanding of our project’s status and next steps
• Other options needed a lot of administration time

Objectives

• Keep track of issues
• Keep track of IT personnel tasks
• Help planing IT related projects
• Cooperate with our external customers and vendors
• Document the solutions to issues
• Reuse knowledge from documented solutions.
• Reduce administration time needed for tracking issues and tasks
• Solve issues and finish tasks in a timely manner

Approach

This time our choice was Trello , which allowed us to organize cards into lists and labels. For those that are not familiar with Trello take a look at this Introduction page. The Idea is to have one board for all issues and tasks for all projects.

We used Trello’s features as follows:

• Labels = Projects
• Lists = Status
• Cards = Tasks / Issues
• Member = Person Assigned to
• Cards order in lists = Priority

The idea was to keep it as simple as possible, so we used the vertical layout of the lists to represent status. The vertical nature of the lists really helps in focusing at a single column each time (90% of the time we will be looking at the “Doing” List). We created the following lists:

1. To Do = Basically our inbox
2. Doing = What we are currently working on or is set to start working
3. Done = What has been completed
4. Someday = Would be nice Tasks
5. Postponed = Tasks we decided to be Postponed