2015-08-13

Discussion of Podio and Trello for DSG project management

Jim showed our project information records in Podio; we use these to store permanent or long-term information about projects, including links to meeting notes, information about project team members, and results of project check-ins and other tracking events

Abbie showed some options for using Podio to track development work for specific DSG development projects (such as the DRS Project Toolkit). We looked at examples from the WWP, using different approaches to organizing and tracking tasks. We agreed to try an approach in which:

• each Toolkit project has its own list in the Trello board (and "infrastructure" is also represented in its own list)
• within each list, the individual project tasks are each represented as a card, with sub-tasks represented as a checklist
• color labels could be used to represent priority or types of work; due dates would represent the actual timing of the task
• we might sometimes attach things like screen shots or other relevant documents to individual cards
• hand-offs from one responsible person to the next (in cases where a task is completed and another one can be started) would be handled manually, facilitated by the Project Coordinator

We also discussed a more temporally-organized Trello board for recurring or strictly calendar-based DSG activities, organized as a perpetual calendar with each month as a separate list in the Trello board:

• each event or activity would be represented with a card in the list for the month when work was required
• sub-tasks would be represented as checklists
• the final due date for the item would be represented as a due date for the card
• each month DSG (or the Coordinator) would go through the cards for that month, moving them forward as needed if further work was required, or archiving them if the task was completed. For events that repeat the following year, the cards would be moved (along with the month) to the end of the perpetual calendar.