Recently our group has run into the upper limit of our current Trello workflow. Each project has a separate board, but the number of projects is ballooning quite a bit. Trello does offer a paid option that allows unlimited boards and features, but it is fairly expensive. NCAR pays for a separate project management system called JIRA that also has a Kanban board feature like Trello along with a lot of other Agile/Scrum functionality. TDD leadership directed John and I to investigate migrating to JIRA from Trello before paying for fancy Trello. After a quick investigation, I want to lay out my thoughts on using JIRA vs. re-configuring Trello.

JIRA Pros and Cons

Like many big enterprise software systems, JIRA has a laundry list of features. It has a Kanban board like Trello, and an Agile scrum story map, and lots of reports that can be calculated from the movement of the cards. There is also a hierarchy of cards from epics, to stories, to tasks, to subtasks, and so on to viscosity. This hierarchy could be handy for medium term planning and for stitching cards together into broader themed tasks. However, it also creates an additional burden of having to learn the Agile (TM) language and way of thinking. That way of thinking can be useful for software development, but we are not just software developers. We are undertaking scientific research, which includes planning and conducting experiments, performing iterative analyses, and communicating with other scientists and stakeholders. JIRA has the potential to support those workflows, but it requires a lot of unnecessary shoehorning into the JIRA mindset rather than adapting JIRA to follow our mindset. 

JIRA also comes with a large bureaucratic overhead by nature of it being enterprise focused. Whenever we want to create a new board or do anything significant, we have to ask permission and wait for CISL help to address the problem. There are also endless backend settings that provide a lot of customization but also require paging through too many manual pages to understand. It's a big learning curve for the group leads to manage the system, and each of these points of friction will make it less likely for the rest of the group to contribute. 

With these issues in mind, I want to suggest a new direction: restructuring our Trello workflow to simplify, organize, and stay in the free tier.

Trello Restructuring

The Trello restructuring plan has a few key elements that should make it easier for everyone to track their tasks across projects and formulate our task thinking in a more scientific manner. Staying on Trello should also reduce the pain of migrating to a different project management system and dealing with all the quirks and pain points along the way. 

1. Consolidate boards. Instead of organizing boards by project, we would organize our boards into the broad tasks that are at the heart of our scientific workflow.
   1. Software: All software development tasks for different projects, like adding new features, debugging, testing.
   2. Analysis: Scientific questions and experiments.
   3. Writing: Assembling papers and presentations.
   4. Strategy: Essentially the current project summary board.
2. Label cards and filter. Instead of separate boards for each project, we will use the label system to tie cards to particular projects and levels of urgency. Cards should also be tagged with people and due dates. Trello has built in filtering features that make it easy to see who is working on what. It should also make it more obvious when your own card stack is going out of control because all of your cards will now be on a smaller set of boards.
3. Dropping breadcrumbs in the cards. Each Trello card contains a big description box that allows more open ended additional information to be added. I highly encourage everyone to take advantage of it by including links to relevant Github issues, documents, paper sections, etc. 

Final Thoughts

I want to make our project management system work for us as much as possible rather than us working for it. Restructuring Trello seems like the most viable option at this time to preserve flexibility and adapt our current workflow to the space of tasks we need to accomplish. What else should this new system include to support your workflow? What concerns do you have about changing?