Kanban with Trello: How Can It Boost Team Productivity?
Team meetings often get bogged down with the all familiar question of ‘what are you working on today?’, which although may be helpful, can be very time consuming. What’s more, your team should already know what the rest of their colleagues are working on, and Kanban is a great way to do this.
What is Kanban?
Kanban is a visual method for managing work and tasks, to maximise efficiency. When your team uses Kanban, it helps to reduce the time it takes to finish a project from start to finish.
The beauty of Kanban is that it is applicable to any industry.
The aim of using Kanban is to encourage team members to only work on a few tasks at a time and prioritise these, to increase efficiency. It also helps to identify any tasks that they may need additional support on.
How to Use Kanban with Trello?
Kanban uses either a physical or digital board to plan and track tasks. It uses cards and columns to separate tasks to encourage a team to commit to work that needs to be completed.
What’s more – Trello is a great way to do this (we also have a blog all about Trello here!)
A popular way of doing this is having three main columns – ‘To Do’, ‘Doing’ and ‘Done’. You can also have additional lists depending on the task in hand.
Here at Siren Search, rather than having one ‘Doing’ list, each of our team members has their own ‘Doing’ list, meaning we can easily identify what tasks each team member is doing.
Image from Trello Blog
So what does each column do?
- Backlog – This is where all projects are kept that the team will need to work on in the future
- To-Do – Tasks that need to be done will sit in this column. It could be tasks that need to be completed this week, that the team need to clear by Friday
- Doing – As the team work on their tasks, cards move into this list. This means that the team can easily see which tasks are being worked on
- Done – Once the task is complete, it can move into this column. At the start of each week, you may want to move all of these tasks back into Backlog or To-Do, to start afresh
A digital Kanban helps the team to work and collaborate with others, and provide valuable updates.
Not only this, but Trello has lots of features that aid the efficiency of Kanban – you can add deadlines to cards or tasks, add people to cards to send notifications when one team member updates the card, and much more!
How Can You Use Kanban?
You don’t have to just use Kanban and Trello for daily task updates. Here are ways you can use it:
- Publishing and Drafting blogs and content – Setting up a Trello board for all of your content ideas helps you to keep track of which blog posts you are planning, in production, and published.
- Planning Projects – Trello is a great way to plan upcoming projects, to help you or your team identify what needs to be done or planned.
- Managing a Sales Pipeline – Trello boards support processes to help you manage your sales pipeline. You can move an inquiry from a client or customer throughout the various steps and processes – such as ‘contact through email’, ‘offer demo’, so forth.
Breaking down projects into smaller tasks, helps teams to feel empowered whilst also speeding up the efficiency that tasks get done.
Think that Kanban could help you, but not sure where to start with Trello? We are now offering a service to set up Trello for you and your team, to help make it easier for you! Contact us now for more information.
