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Ignoring the specifics of my examples, which really aren't important, the problem is the frequency with which these process failures happen. If the board is in

Ignoring the specifics of my examples, which really aren't important, the problem is the frequency with which these process failures happen. If the board is in a near-constant state of mayhem and flux because the sales director makes a list of "super urgent" bugs that have come out of a client meeting (because, of course, categorisation of bug urgency is not something mere mortals can really handle - everything is always urgent) and the art director has suddenly decided to make another list of visual flaws he's spotted, and so on, then no one can really get anything done because it all surprisingly quickly turns into a mess. I find Trello enables this sort of behaviour because the barrier to entry is so low, and I say this because I've seen it happen several times. As I said upthread, Trello is adequate if you've got a project manager vigilantly pruning the board - but if you have the resources for a project manager able to do that, then why not just get them to use something that's really much better suited to the purpose? Anyway, this is just my opinion based on my experience. Trello is a good tool for certain things. I don't think it's a great tool for managing a software project with a team of more than about three people, and even if you can make it work, I think most teams would really just benefit from using either JIRA or equivalent, or maybe GitHub Projects (which I haven't tried, but it looks quite good). Thanks for your reply.

logicallee 9y ago
This actually makes it super clear, thanks for expanding! What do you think about this: Based on what you've written, for companies that are married to Trello it almost sounds like there should be a 'staging' board and a 'production' board where the process failures you allude to can happen on 'staging', but the devs really just see 'production' -- and as soon as stakeholders stop interfering for a while they start matching. :) Then the vigilant PM can move things over to production as they figure out wtf just got 'committed' to staging. (This sync and the fake access may require some kind of automation). Thoughts? (I know this is off-hand. But in a way I kind of like the power of important people to directly fuck with a todo board. There are so many broken processes where unimportant things are worked on and important things get pushed into a backlog. I mean there's a reason the people you mentioned got the access to fuck up the board in the first place, isn't there?) This is veering kind of off-topic and I do feel I understand your point very well now, so this is just kind of a hypothetical. Thanks for your answers.
- bshimmin 9y ago
  I think a Trello board for non-technical stakeholders to raise a load of stuff is probably a fine idea, and almost certainly better than hastily firing off emails that will disappear into a blackhole, as you mentioned earlier. As long as that board doesn't interfere with an actual development sprint board, I would be totally happy!
  - logicallee 9y ago
    Thanks for all your answers - this was interesting. :)

logicallee 9y ago

This actually makes it super clear, thanks for expanding! What do you think about this: Based on what you've written, for companies that are married to Trello it almost sounds like there should be a 'staging' board and a 'production' board where the process failures you allude to can happen on 'staging', but the devs really just see 'production' -- and as soon as stakeholders stop interfering for a while they start matching. :) Then the vigilant PM can move things over to production as they figure out wtf just got 'committed' to staging. (This sync and the fake access may require some kind of automation). Thoughts? (I know this is off-hand. But in a way I kind of like the power of important people to directly fuck with a todo board. There are so many broken processes where unimportant things are worked on and important things get pushed into a backlog. I mean there's a reason the people you mentioned got the access to fuck up the board in the first place, isn't there?) This is veering kind of off-topic and I do feel I understand your point very well now, so this is just kind of a hypothetical. Thanks for your answers.

bshimmin 9y ago
I think a Trello board for non-technical stakeholders to raise a load of stuff is probably a fine idea, and almost certainly better than hastily firing off emails that will disappear into a blackhole, as you mentioned earlier. As long as that board doesn't interfere with an actual development sprint board, I would be totally happy!
- logicallee 9y ago
  Thanks for all your answers - this was interesting. :)