Let's run cycles of task management, sharing, and improvement as a team ~ Trello + Toggl use case

Tadashi Shigeoka ·  Fri, May 13, 2016

Recently, I’ve been mainly working on “business improvement for the merchandising team.” By the way, from January to March, I was improving shipping operations in the warehouse.

Since I started working on business improvement, I’ve been hearing voices saying “I don’t know who’s doing what on the same team.” Since I happened to be working with a development team and had expertise in this area, I’d like to share some insights.

Premise

This is a document summarizing what I think about “how we should run improvement cycles” to work smoothly as a team.

I hope this can serve as a starting point for those thinking “I don’t know how to improve things on a daily basis…”

PDCA approach for continuous improvement

Regarding work approaches, it's often said that "PDCA is fundamental." Let me briefly explain PDCA.

PDCA is a concept originally proposed by W. Edwards Deming and others as a method for smoothly proceeding with management tasks like production management and quality control.

PDCA stands for “Plan・Do・Check・Action.” The meaning of each is said to be as follows:

Plan: Make a plan Do: Execute Check: Evaluate Action: Improve

It’s also called the “PDCA Cycle.” Going P→D→C→A, then from A to the next P. It’s said that “continuously running this cycle and continuously improving” is important.

Steps for running work improvement cycles as a team

Below, I’ll introduce the steps for running business improvement cycles by STEP.

You can try implementing all STEPs at once, or you might introduce them gradually. 3, 2, 1 step!

STEP 1. Visualize team members' tasks

Do you know what tasks your team members are working on? If not, first let’s visualize “who” is doing “what.” For team task management, I recommend a tool called Trello.

How to use Trello

Below, I’ll explain the setup methods and procedures for task management with Trello.

  1. Create a Board
  2. Add team members to the Board
  3. Create Lists in Trello
  4. Add Cards to Trello
  5. Assign task owners to Cards
  6. Set Due dates for tasks with deadlines
  7. Recommended Trello operation methods for Daily/Weekly tasks
  8. Utilize Checklists
  9. [Bonus] Change Background to boost motivation

STEP 2. Measure how much time tasks are taking

Once you can see what tasks are being done with Trello, next measure “how much time they’re taking.” I recommend using the time management tool Toggl to track task time, as it makes retrospection easy.

Weekly emails summarizing “how much time was spent on which tasks” help you roughly review what you did in a week.

In my case, my work is mainly “development,” but this can be categorized into “requirement gathering,” “design,” “implementation,” “code review,” “release work,” “Q&A response,” etc. I used it to visualize how much time each GitHub issue took for each category.

Once you get used to this, you can understand roughly how many minutes each task takes, so you can estimate how much work you can finish in a day.

How to use Toggl

You must install the Toggl Button browser extension.

Installing the Chrome Extension or Firefox Add-on displays Toggl buttons in various places like Gmail and Trello, making it easy to start tracking.

Sharing Toggl as a team:

  • Create a Workspace
  • Add Team members to the Workspace
  • Create Projects
  • Change Team to Everyone
  • Setting Client is recommended as it displays in hierarchical structure in Chrome Extension
  • Track work time
  • Regularly review time spent on tasks within the team

STEP 3. Optimize tasks

Optimize time-consuming tasks Once you’ve visualized how much time each task takes, the next step is task optimization. If there are tasks taking longer than you expected, investigate what’s taking time by breaking down tasks into smaller pieces for verification.

Discuss optimization methods within your team or involving other teams.

Declutter tasks You’ll probably find tasks that take time but can’t be optimized further and don’t justify their cost-effectiveness. Consult with your team or supervisor about whether such tasks can be discontinued.

FAQ

  • Q) I want to reduce time spent on routine aggregation tasks
    • For example, timing yourself and aiming for new records
    • But if you discover aggregation tasks that nobody really needs, it's better to never spend time updating them again
  • A) Using Toggl to first track how much time each task takes is recommended
    • You can visualize tasks taking more time than imagined, wasteful tasks, etc.

Finally ~ Business Improvement Mindset

Life is STEP. Work is STEP.

Every day, steadily accumulating, toward a tomorrow better than today.

Reference Information

Trello

Card Registration

Extension that allows creating Trello tasks based on Gmail email content

Extension that allows creating Trello tasks from GitHub issue pages

Display

Extension that sets label colors as Card background colors. It dramatically improves visibility, so please install it.

Extension that displays Card count per List.

Extension that allows hiding specific Lists within a Board.

Useful when “you have many lists in a Board and want to hide some.”

Toggl

That’s all from the Gemba.