In our company, our use case for Trello is that it's used for individual projects, e.g. for our marketing department, data department, etc. We use it to assign tasks, to track what stage each task is currently on, to add notes, etc. We use the solution to check the progress within various departments and various projects that we have within our company.
The key benefit that Trello has provided to our company is organization. Currently, for each department and each project, we know where we are and what we still have on our plate. We know what's top priority and what's low priority, etc. Trello provides basic organization across all departments within our company.
Personally, I love the user interface of Trello, because it's very modern, easy to understand, and it allows you to move one task from stage to stage through its drag and drop functionality.
I also love that you're able to add images, tag your colleagues, and provide updates within any kind of task.
These are the main features and functionalities I enjoy the most out of Trello.
Its hard to say what could be improved in Trello, because it does what it was designed to do, and it's simple, so it's really hard to come up with any flaws.
If I were to name one, it will be for the solution to have more integrations, e.g. they already have quite a few, but we're heavy users of a CRM called Creational, and there's no direct integration with that particular CRM system, but that CRM system is one of the top five CRMs out there. I found it quite odd and strange that integration between Trello and Creational isn't available, while for Salesforce, it's there. Having more integration with third party tools is an area for improvement for Trello.
I also haven't actually looked too much into it, and I'm not sure if this is currently available in Trello: having something along the lines of WhatsApp, where you're able to hold down a button and leave a voice message for your colleagues. It's an additional feature I'd love to see in the next release of Trello, because I think that's also a very quick and great way to be able to communicate with your colleagues. It'll be so much quicker than having to type long sentences or paragraphs to explain. Having voice messaging as an additional functionality in Trello would be great.
We've been active users of Trello for the past five years. It's a cloud-based solution, so it automatically gets updated, and this means we're always on the latest version.
The stability of Trello is top-notch. I would rate it five out of five. It's super stable.
The scalability in Trello is amazing. If you have a big project or an existing project, you want to create a new Trello board in just a couple of clicks. Being able to invite additional employees, team members, and colleagues, would take just a few clicks, e.g. you just need to input their emails or the first name, last name, and emails. Invite are sent, so they're able to log in, and they're integrated directly. Everything is very fast and easy to use.
We tried to use other solutions that turned out to be a little bit more complex, e.g. Monday.com, Asana, and quite a few other ones. We've actually tested around 10 different solutions, and we were looking for something a little bit more structured, a little bit more organized. After testing all these other solutions, we understood that simplicity is key and that's basically why Trello won. That's why we've been using Trello for the past five years.
The initial setup for Trello was very simple, that even a six year old child would be able to do it and use it. You go to the site as it's all browser-based, but I know that they also have an application that's available on Android and iOS.
To use the app, all you need to do is to download it, log into your account, and you'll be ready to go. It's super simple. You're also able to customize the stages, but it literally takes seconds to do, including creating your own Trello cards, and your own pages. The process was very quick, easy, and intuitive.
We didn't have to use a consultant or integrator to implement Trello. I doubt that anybody would actually use one for this solution, unless they have something crazy in mind.
Trello has a paid version, but we've been using just the free version. It covers all of the bases and all of our needs for us, so there's no cost involved for us. This is surprising for such a quality platform with no limitations on the key functionalities, because you can take advantage of those functionalities without having to pay for the solution.
I'm not sure who the cloud provider is for Trello, but I'm assuming it's AWS.
We have eight to ten people using Trello in our company. It's just all management, e.g. the executive level, the team leads, it's management across the board. We're not a huge organization, but it's being used extensively. It's being used daily, e.g. we do have weekly calls with our main management team, and the first thing we do on every call is opening up Trello. We go through all of the cards to find out what's outstanding, what's moving, etc. This is how we operate, and this is how we're staying organized, through using Trello on a daily basis.
As the organization grows and we have more people in management, we could increase usage of Trello, and start including more people, but we're also potentially thinking of a way to be able to implement it and having just regular employees on there as well. It just adds a whole new level of organization to our business.
I've not had the chance to contact the technical support team of Trello, because for all of the years I've used it, absolutely nothing breaks, and nothing goes wrong. I'm not even sure they have a support team, e.g. I'm sure they do, but I've never had the need to actually contact them.
My advice to people looking into implementing Trello is to just do it. It's really a great software, and it's very easy to use. It's a great collaboration tool, as long as you implement it into your organization properly. I always have a game plan. You shouldn't expect to implement any kind of software and feel that it's going to make drastic changes to your organization. Make sure you have a game plan behind it, so once you're implementing it, you understand what kind of stages you need on your Trello board, and building processes behind that.
I'd give Trello a rating of nine out of ten, because I just don't believe that any product would be perfect. We really enjoyed using Trello, but we're hoping they'd surprise us in the future, e.g. through a new feature or functionality we haven't even thought about. We'll definitely continue using the solution, in the hope that they'd grow to be bigger and better.
We have a service desk for customers. We have the whole flow from customer feedback throughout, committing with a relation in the code in Bitbucket.
We have the tracking and tracing, including all tracking of the issues all the way from the customer throughout the JIRA prioritization in backlogs and sprint planning and connecting those through the actual code commit in BItBucket. It's all done through JIRA to the service desk issue and back again to the customer. The entire ecosystem is quite connected.
The best features depend a bit on the project going on. We have some project managers for the Classic Project setup and all the features that come along with the Classic Projects.
From my point of view, the NextGen Project in the cloud solution is really easy to start up with and it's quite flexible in how you put up columns and move issues and tickets throughout the status and columns that you put up.
It's really flexible. From the Atlassian point of view, I can see they are moving towards more Next-Gen Project handling. The features from the Classical Projects are being continuously rolled out towards Next-Gen Projects. Of course, there's still lots of ground to cover.
It's really smart how they connected third-party vendors into their own marketplace. You can create and add apps. Anybody can do it. There's some approval function or a step via the Atlassian team to be able to actually endorse your apps throughout their marketplace. However, it's very smart to have collaboration between the company and third parties. Whatever functionality is lacking, there's most likely an app for it.
I've seen some updates and subscriptions where you can get newsfeeds if you subscribe. They are focused on making the solution as responsive as possible. For instance, they have enabled some features called Project Archiving. If you're done with some project work, you could choose to archive everything related to it. Therefore, it won't be upfront taking resources from your solution, however, you'd still have access to it in the future.
Pretty much 70% - 80% of the Next-Gen Projects features are still to be developed. It's my understanding that the reason they started doing the Next-Gen and changing up the whole dual-end functionality is probably because of how heavy and big everything was getting. It had gotten pretty complex within the Classical Projects.
It's quite time-consuming picking up the Classical Projects. They've gotten quite heavy and it's hard to use them in a productive way. There are just so many settings and possibilities. It's very complex and time-consuming, however, on the other hand, it's got everything you need in terms of functionality.
We've been using the solution for a year and a half now. It hasn't been too long so far.
The solution is quite stable. We haven't faced any stability issues.
The solution is quite scalable. They also allow you to archive old projects so that they don't take up space on your product, and that can help you scale. You might need a specific kind of subscription in order to archive, however.
I don't really have much experience with the technical support team at JIRA. I've been reading the community tickets mostly. Most of what I've been curious about, I've been able to find the answer myself via the community or the WIKI.
You can communicate with other users, which is really smart. It allows you to discuss best practices effectively. At the same time, I would guess that some of the users there would be actual Atlassian employees that are commenting and guiding. Overall, the community space is quite helpful. Therefore, I haven't really had any issues or tickets or any need to connect with a technical team in Atlassian.
One of my colleagues actually had an issue when a new user was invited before he had opened his 365 email. He had not logged in to the email account. Therefore, when the invitation was sent from Atlassian or from JIRA, I can't remember exactly which module, but then there was feedback that this was not an active email account, which made Atlassian revoke the whole user. Then, when he actually logged into 365, he wasn't able to connect to JIRA due to the fact that the email had been marked as expired or not an active email. He sent the request to Atlassian and they opened up a ticket and everything was fine within a couple of hours. It was really quick. That I think is probably the only dialogue we've had with the technical support in Atlassian and it was pretty positive. I'd say overall we're quite satisfied with their level of support.
The initial setup's level of complexity varies. If you use the Next-Gen Project, you can get it up and running in, I would say, five minutes. That part's quite easy.
You can also just subscribe and you can get the free version. I really like that kind of subscription that you can start with quite a few features available. You can get it started for up to five to 10 users without any cost. Then, when you start getting the ball rolling or the projects rolling, you have to actually insert your credit cards to both get features unlocked, and also to add more people to the projects and to the solution.
If you want to, you can add on quite a lot of features and connect with the apps from the Atlassian marketplace. That's also a really nice possibility. You can just click, add apps and it takes about 30 seconds. Then you have added functionality injected to your solution.
I would guess we are using the latest version of the solution as we're using the cloud solution. I'm guessing that it's continuously updated automatically.
I'd advise others to consider the solution. However, It depends on what they're trying to achieve. There are a lot of easier project management tools like Monday.com, for instance. It's a lot easier to get up and running.
If your vision is to become a larger software development company, monday.com might be something that is usable for project managers. However, it wouldn't be a good tool, at least how I've seen it, to connect everything together as we're able to do in the JIRA cloud with all the connecting apps. I would guess we would be able to integrate Monday to JIRA or something like that.
It's really easy to get JIRA connected to Confluence and Bitbucket and to have the service desk as well. That way, everything is in one place. Again, it depends, on based on where you're heading. If the company is looking for easy project management, there's a lot of tools that would be just as good as the JIRA. If you're looking to distributing the teams and connecting a whole ecosystem, then definitely JIRA is a good pick.
I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.
We're using Smartsheet at the enterprise level throughout the organization. We did a test at the corporate office before moving forward. In the beginning, we were only using Smartsheet to help our corporate users open new facilities and convert warehouse management systems. Also, we used it in implementation at sites with new customers. Eventually, we began using Smartsheet for entire projects. We transitioned from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet for all of our projects.
I'm consulting with a company that uses Microsoft Project, which isn't cloud-based. Smartsheet is cloud-based, so it's more accessible. We need not worry about saving versions of the file when someone makes changes. For example, Microsoft Project locked up while someone was saving a file, and we couldn't access the original file properly.
Smartsheet offers more than Project because it's similar to a table-based, database-type system. It's like a hybrid between Excel and project software. We were able to enter the formulas and do much of the automation. We added budgets to it and linked them to a vendor page. Smartsheet let us integrate the budget into the project seamlessly. With Project, we needed to open up Excel.
Smartsheet should continue to expand the spreadsheet-type functionality because it's limited currently. Most business users are familiar with Excel and Office, so Smartsheet should adopt a similar way of navigating the program.
When you're moving through cells or fields, you can't move with your arrows flipping back between things. If you hit enter, it doesn't do the same thing it does in Excel.
I have been using Smartsheet for about three years.
The stability is excellent.
Smartsheet is scalable. We deployed it in 47 large distribution centers across the United States, and we had six projects running on it. The corporate office could view all of the projects at once because the program management option is terrific.
Smartsheet support is fantastic. It's better than any I've ever dealt with before. They could answer any question I had about the functionality in a given use case. They were serious superusers. It wasn't just like, "Well, let me check." They actually knew the answer. We'd have a resolution in minutes because of how they had it set up for our organization.
Overall, setting up Smartsheet is pretty straightforward, but sometimes the project settings and the Office-style functionality limit people from getting the information as quickly as possible.
I don't know that that's a Smartsheet issue as much as it is a user issue. They have to understand that when somebody requests to open a project, they need to accept it, activate it, and move forward quickly.
The cost varies based on the number of users and the commitment that we gave them. I think it was reasonable. I can't remember the exact cost, but it's less than Microsoft Project.
I rate Smartsheet nine out of 10. Smartsheet has room for improvement, but they're moving in the right direction. If you're planning to implement Smartsheet, you need to take the time to prepare upfront. Depending on the organization's size, you need to gain experience and train some superusers.
You need a few people to learn the ins and outs and get in-depth training in the specific features they will utilize. Learn as much as possible about the system and do a lot of hands-on training right out of the gate.
