Later in this post you’ll see which advantages I got besides those written on Trello promo pages.

How I convinced colleagues to use it

Of course first what came to my head is how will I manage to convince my colleagues to use it, because people usually don’t like to change working habits. I saw several potential obstacles for implementing this idea:

Not too many people will agree to communicate in this tool. In this case those who are reluctant would say that the information in Trello is not actual and won’t use it also

In this case those who are reluctant would say that the information in Trello is not actual and won’t use it also Some of users will miss messages, important news. Since it is a new platform for them, they won’t keep it open the whole day as Outlook, and won’t get notifications promptly

The second one was solved once I’ve noticed that e-mail notifications are turned on by default. Since I sent all invitations to sign up to colleagues’ work e-mails, they get notifications to their Outlook, which means they won’t miss anything.

The first one was the real issue. To make people use Trello I had to guarantee that information there is actual and relevant. I decided to start only one project in Trello at first and chose the one which had people who seem as early adapters to me. I talked to them about such idea and received support. That got me thinking that if this ‘pilot project’ succeed, I could use it as a real example to convince others to switch to Trello also.

The result was even better. People were so exited to use something new, something modern and useful that they shared their experience with their colleagues without me asking them to do it. Some of them noticed that they can use fancy stickers if they invite new users (1 month of ‘Trello Gold’ per each new user) and sent invitations to colleagues they are friends with.

After some time it was pretty usual for them to communicate to each other using this tool. Of course, we still have couple of people who resist to use it, but these people are not involved in the project tasks that much, so I usually post updates from them to Trello by myself.

What Trello gave me and my colleagues

The main advantage which me and my colleagues got from using Trello is improved communications. Communication is essential for project management. Information should be actual and prompt, it should be distributed among relevant people and it has to be short enough so that people actually read it. That’s exactly what I got:

No damn CC. Remember how you were added to that e-mail thread which is not very relevant to you but you don’t ask people to remove you from it, because you’re afraid that in 10 e-mails the conversation will come to the point which you need to be aware of? In Trello you can always see everything you want, the whole status of project, any conversation about any task, but you don’t have to get notifications every 5 minutes. You can subscribe to some tasks or lists of tasks if you want to get instant notifications on them, but once you are no longer interested in it, you can unsubscribe and you won’t lose the information, because you still can open up that task/list and see everything.