Monday.com is a project management tool. It's also a process monitoring platform, team management hub, low-code development environment, and more. What looks at first glance like a spreadsheet with added smarts is, in fact, a flexible hub for managing and monitoring a distributed workload, keeping teams on the same page, and tracking projects as they progress. It's so flexible that there are few teams for which it couldn't sit at the heart of their ongoing business.

There are three distinct modules to the Monday.com platform. Here, we're looking at Monday.com for Work Management, but this is supplemented by CRM and Dev environments. The first of these helps with lead capture, sales pipelines, and customer onboarding, while the Dev option eyes sprint management, bug tracking, and roadmap planning. There's some commonality between them, chiefly in the way they present information, which is tied to tasks that progress through distinct stages as work is completed.

Each is built around a board, much like a spreadsheet database hybrid, that can be sorted, arranged, and split as appropriate. So, if you have separate teams responsible for discrete steps in an overall process, you could define these within your table. As a member of one team marks their work complete, automation (see below) could move it from their section of the board to the next, for an at-a-glance overview of the current state of play.

Monday.com: Sign-up and pricing

Sign-up is a breeze. Specify a name, password, and company, select what you'd like to manage – legal, HR, operations, and so on – and where you want to focus first. This could be contact management, strategic planning, your sales pipeline, or a dozen other options. You can then start inviting colleagues to collaborate. Beyond this, there's a simple wizard that will help you set up your first board so you can start using it right away, even before your colleagues sign up.

If you're using the free tier, you can enroll two seats in total, and organize up to 200 items on three boards. Beyond that, you're paying on a per-seat per-month basis, subject to a minimum of three seats. So Basic, which lifts the restriction on the number of boards and items you can manage, costs £8 per seat per month, equivalent to a starting price of £288 a year if you pay upfront, where you benefit from an 18% discount, or £396 if you split the cost 12 ways. 

Three other tiers, each of them more expensive, naturally push things further. Standard, starting at £13 per seat per month, introduces timeline and Gantt views, guest access, automations, and integrations. Pro (£21 per seat per month) includes private boards, chart views, time tracking, and the ability to use formulas to perform calculations on your data. And Enterprise, for which you'll need to discuss the fee with Sales, improves on existing security, automation, integration, and permissions controls.

Monday.com: Spreadsheets

At its simplest, Monday.com is a smart table with columns for tasks, owners, status and so on. You can use it to plan work, assign tasks, and monitor progress. So far, so simple, but dig deeper and it's a lot more accomplished.

If the table layout doesn't suit your way of working and you're signed to Standard or above, switch to the calendar or timeline, see how sequential jobs rely on earlier tasks with a Gantt chart, or use a kanban board like you'd find in Trello.

All data can be input and managed manually, with users populating cards and assigning them to teams or individuals. However, pay for the Standard tier or above, and you can integrate the third-party tools you already use elsewhere. More than 200 apps, including Teams, Slack, Gmail, and Excel, can share data with the platform. You could create a task directly from a message received in Gmail, or build a Monday.com dashboard widget drawing data from QuickBooks.

Some of these integrations are free, but not all. You can connect to DocuSign, track issues in Github, or use Ziflow to share and review creative assets without paying anything extra – but, depending on the extension you choose, you could be looking at $4 a month to embed Microsoft Office files, and between $50 and $750 a month to integrate Zoom phone. As a rule of thumb, if the integration is developed by a third party, it's more likely you'll need to pay. The Microsoft and Zoom examples cited above are each a case in point: neither Microsoft nor Zoom were the original developers of the add-ons in question.

Monday.com: Low-code programming

Where a feature doesn't already exist, you may be able to develop it yourself using no-code/low-code programming. The idea behind no-code/low-code is that teams are given the tools they need to produce their own workflows. The benefits are obvious: so long as they have a clear idea of how the workflow will operate and don't put company data at risk, they can avoid writing lengthy spec documents and instead produce the program themselves, rather than sharing a central development resource with other departments, and waiting for their job to reach the top of the stack.

If you've ever used IFTTT, which relies on conditions, tests, and actions, the process will be familiar: test for condition X and, if met, do Y. Start by picking an option from a 'When this happens' menu, like 'date arrives', 'status changes', or 'update created', then pick an outcome: move an item to a group, send an email, create an item in a board, and so on. Many outcomes have options, too, so, to dig further into the email-sending example, you can specify the recipient, subject line, and body copy, and drag in variables like item names, status, and due dates. Use this to notify team members when they've been assigned a task and there will be no excuse for projects running late.

The number of integrations and automation you can set is determined by your tier. Standard gets you 250 actuations of each, rising to 25,000 if you upgrade to Pro. You don't get any on the free plan, which is fair enough, but we think it's a bit stingy that Basic loses out, too.

Monday.com: Workflow

Monday.com bills itself as a Work OS. Its low-code programming features probably justify this on their own, but additional tools, like file sharing and the ability to attach chat threads to individual board items go a long way to giving them greater context and helping keep the team focused on a single environment, in much the same way that the tools for sharing within context do in platforms like Teams and Slack.

Separately, a Workdocs feature provides space for less specific collaboration where colleagues can chat, draw up lists and checkboxes, brainstorm, share images, and more. Team members can contribute simultaneously, and everything is saved automatically. You can link Workdocs to one another, other users, and even embed a board inside a Workdoc for a single point of reference.

Workdocs first appeared in 2021 but other additions, like the button column, are more recent. Implement this, and you can tie a specific action to a button embedded in your board, by completing a simple form – much as you would when setting up an automation. Other recent additions include CSV imports, automatic task assignment, keyboard navigation, and more granular board filtering.

Perhaps inevitably, AI also makes an appearance. Built on Azure OpenAI, Monday.com suggests you'd use it to quickly define the tasks required to complete common projects, summarise documents, or develop formulas to embed in a board and analyze its contents.

Monday.com: Integration with rival platforms

You can't argue that Monday.com lacks a USP – but that's not to say it lacks rivals. However you organize your tasks, whether you prefer kanban, Gantt, or the smart table, the board is its central focus and, for our money, its strongest appeal. Additional features, like chat and AI, are logical extensions, but not something you can't find elsewhere.

Teams and Slack are both working hard to integrate AI, and they have document sharing and live collaboration features built in, much like Monday.com. Each is fully tooled to act as a team hub, and you can access features of project management tools, like Teamwork.com, Trello, and even Monday.com, through extensions. The Monday.com extensions for Slack and Teams let you add items to boards from within either platform, so long as you're signed up to Monday.com's Standard tier or above.

Monday.com: Is it right for you?

As is common across the SaaS landscape, you can sign up and get started for free. However, where Slack and Teams offer pretty much anything smaller organizations could need in their gratis plans, that's not the case with Monday.com. Here, the Free tier limits you to two seats, three boards, and 200 items (which you can increase to 1000 through referrals). If it could stretch this to three seats, we could live with the three-board limit – but, depending on your business, that 200-item start point could be an issue.

Monday.com claims that the Standard tier, at £13 per seat per month, subject to a minimum of three seats, is the most popular option, and it's not hard to see why. This level introduces automations and integrations; timeline, Gantt, and calendar views; Zoom integration; and guest access. You'll also benefit from the custom fields, unlimited boards, and unlimited documents that carry over from the £11 per seat per month Basic plan.

Even if you only make light use of the platform, paying for the Standard tier gets you a lot of features at a very fair price, which makes it easy to recommend.

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Google has officially opened its long-awaited Bay View campus that aims to entice workers back into the office.

First announced in 2017, the Bay View campus is the first to be fully developed and built by the tech giant. The all-electric building is located only a seven-minute drive from Google’s main headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway and is capable of seating 4350 employees.

Divided into two levels, the ground floor combines meeting rooms and cafés that aim to provide opportunities for workers to make real-life connections and foster collaboration. The upper level, however, is divided into noise-buffered cubicles that enable team members to focus on their tasks – as well as connect with remote-based coworkers using video conferencing equipment.

Google’s director of R+D for the Built Environment, Michelle Kaufmann, described the upper level as “more quiet”, allowing Googlers to “focus on that immediate team”.

The design of the Bay Area campus has been based on Google’s commitment to “operate every hour of every day on carbon-free energy by 2030”. The building is powered by nearby wind farms and sources solar power through its innovative dragonscale rooftop panels, which are separated by large overhead windows, allowing for natural daylight and reduced electricity consumption. It also gathers rainwater using above-ground ponds, which serve as water sources for cooling towers, flushing toilets, as well as irrigating the landscape as part of the tech giant’s commitment to replenishing 120% of the water it consumes by 2030.

Commenting on the newly-unveiled Bay Area campus, Google’s Real Estate & Workplace Services VP David Radcliffe said that, “with a distributed workforce, an office needs to create harmony between those who are in the office and those who are elsewhere”.

“The flexible nature of the focus and collaboration spaces at Bay View is just one way to accommodate these changes. I truly believe these buildings will keep up as we introduce new spaces to improve hybrid work,” he added.

Google employees were required to return to their designated offices in April, with most required to attend at least three days per week as part of the company-wide hybrid work policy. However, with many reluctant to leave their home working spaces behind, the tech giant has opted to lure its US workers back to the office with a free e-scooter, while also planning further large-scale campus investments.

Microsoft has unveiled a new Office app called Loop which is designed to offer hybrid workers a more fluid way to collaborate and share documents.

The new service is based on the Fluid Framework tools the company launched in 2020.

Loop consists of three elements - Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces - and is described as an app that "combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that move freely and stay in sync across apps".

Essentially, Microsoft is looking to offer more value for 365 subscribers and improve the ways they can work together in hybrid environments.

Loop components is an evolution of Fluid components, which are single units of productivity that help users collaborate and complete tasks, whether that's over chat, email, meetings or documents. It can be as simple as a list, or as sophisticated as a customer sales opportunity, according to Microsoft, with the service remaining in sync, no matter where a user works.

This includes a voting table, which Microsoft says makes it easy for teams to brainstorm and finalise decisions together. There is also a 'status tracker' that teams can use to gather information, track progress of a project and monitor the status of the team's involvement.

Loop components will also have some business-specific features, such as Dynamics 365 records, which is aimed at business workflows.

Loop pages are also part of Loop components. These are flexible canvases where teams can organise their components, pulling together files, links or other forms of data to help their collaborative workflows. Pages are "optimised for thinking together and getting work done", according to Microsoft, where they can start small and continue to grow to match the size of the team's ideas.

The final element is Loop workspaces, which are shared spaces that allow teams to see and group their projects. It allows all members of the team to catch up on what everyone is working on, react to ideas and track the progress of team goals.

There isn't an official release date for Loop but Components have begun to be released for some Microsoft services. At present, there isn't any dedicated support in Microsoft Teams, but an app is thought to be in the works.

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Thanks to improvements in digital workspace technology over the past several years, distributed workforces with all their benefits have become an increasingly viable option for businesses.

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While 2020 in general can hardly be described as “mobile”, with people worldwide under lockdown for most of the year, from a tech standpoint mobile has very much been at the forefront of the shift in working patterns seen over the past 12 months.

Speaking at the opening keynote of Appian World 2021, once again held virtually, Appian CEO Matt Calkin described how corporate mobile usage “surged” in the past year. Corporate mobile usage, he noted, was up 220% over the past four quarters, as workers shifted to using tablets and laptops – their own as well as corporately provisioned – to make it easier to work from home.

“This was all [obvious] in retrospect … but it wasn’t obvious in 2019,” Calkin told viewers. As a consequence many applications and providers struggled to deal with this shift. He claimed that 17 apps out of 20 were unable to pivot to mobile usage, causing problems for them and their customers.

“You can see there was a lot of hold back, that software got in the way of a lot of people's preferred usage patterns, and prohibited a kind of a lot of flexibility in work behaviour, and process behaviour,” Calkin told IT Pro.

Appian, however, managed to deal with the sudden change in working practices easily, he said, as it was already mobile ready. Consequently, its corporate mobile app usage grew 1,970% over the same 12 month period.

These growth figures, both 220% and 1970%, both show how much the world wanted to change, Calkin said, with Appian’s success showing the strength of low-code in a changing environment.

“The value proposition is clear. Low code allows you agility, and businesses want that – which is all of them – have been coming to us and looking for it,” he said. “I heard that businesses are talking about low code 10 times as much as they were a year ago. So the hype is definitely up. But I think also the value provided is up. There’s a realisation that low code is a good route to the kind of digitalisation and agility that businesses are looking for.”

Calkin echoed these sentiments during his keynote, saying that this switch to a mobile-focused business landscape is the reason low-code is here to stay.

“All customers are going to want to write once and deploy everywhere,” he said, adding that low-code enables that, which low-code companies “should be shouting from the rooftops”.

Zoom has rolled out a video background feature called Immersive View that aims to make video calls feel more like physical, in-person meetings.

The feature was unveiled last year at the firm's Zoomtopia conference but has this week rolled out to both free and paid-for accounts for meetings and webinars of up to 25 participants.

Zoom already has virtual background options, but Immersive View - which is available on Zoom desktop for Windows and macOS - adds functions to select and move participants into more realistic scenarios. It can be enabled via the dropdown menu where you can find 'Speaker' and 'Gallery' view.

From there, users will have the choice to either automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes, such as a boardroom or auditorium, or do so manually.

Each attendee can be resized by the host and moved around a chosen scene, and users can even upload their own. It's possible to use any image as an Immersive View background, but Zoom recommends that matching up file type, aspect ratio and resolution, as it has with its choices, will produce the best results.

"Whether you want to create the feeling of being in a classroom, a boardroom, a conference auditorium, or your favourite place to catch up with friends, Zoom's Immersive View assembles up to 25 participants in one fun, consistent meeting environment," Zoom product marketing specialist, David Ball, said in a blog post.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations; calls over 25 people will see remaining guests in a strip of video thumbnails at the top of the scene. Worse, participants that are not using the latest version of Zoom will simply see the standard grid. Recordings are also subject to these limitations; they'll be recorded in the standard Speaker or Gallery View, rather than a fun virtual scene.

As many of us have become used to a remote working model as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have had to consider a new approach to their flexible working policies.

Not only is there a requirement for organisations to protect themselves from disruption in the future, but they also need to find a solution in response to their employees who’ve expressed they’d like to continue working from home.

In fact, a recent study by the ONS found that 57% of Londoners worked from home during May 2020 and May 2021, and almost 90% of UK employees said they’d like to work from home in some capacity on an ongoing basis.

Companies can no longer assume that the distractions of home life will affect productivity, as employees have successfully contributed to the continuation of work (41% of people in the UK reported the same level of productivity).

Those businesses that can introduce a hybrid, or flexible working policy will not only retain their staff’s skill sets, they’ll also attract future talent. Companies are getting wiser to this with adverts promoting remote working at 307% of the average level in February 2020 and almost 1/5th of UK businesses looking to switch to remote working completely.

Here we share five of the top benefits a flexible return to work policy will bring to your business that takes employee needs into consideration and contribute to continued business success.

1. Higher job satisfaction

While remote work was a rising trend before the pandemic, only 6% of UK workers were fully remote at the beginning of 2020, and the office was still the standard. The idea of the over-exhausted employee 'on the grind' was also a standard, a common image that many had come to view as a marker of success.

Despite this way of working that a majority of us bought into, flexible policies are actually what contributes to higher job satisfaction. Back in 2018, 87% of people reported wanting to work remotely, and after having a taste of remote work out of necessity, 62% of senior executives and 58% of entry-level workers reported wanting a combination of remote work and in-office days, in a nationwide survey last September.

Allowing your employees to choose their hours and location is part of how you show them you value their life outside of work, and so it makes sense that flexible policies would increase job satisfaction.

For the wider business, this means less turnover, less time advertising roles, advertising, and onboarding, and a workplace (however distributed) full of employees who will work harder for a company they feel cares about them.

2. Increased productivity

Although remote working has been out of necessity this time around, 58% of workers reported higher productivity in this survey, and 35% of business leaders said their teams are working more collaboratively.

Whether the home environment is quieter or more comfortable, the office environment is too distracting, or remote workers are just happier for a number of reasons that results in better performance, those working from home are generally more productive.

Cloud applications and services are a vital component to ensuring this performance continues in the long term. Employees need real-time communication platforms to help them collaborate effectively, and security strategies must keep up with the distributed workforce. Organisations will likely need to invest more in their cloud infrastructure and maintain updated tools for measures like identity and access management, but there's a big pay-off when employees are satisfied, productive, and secure.

3. Better work/life balance and less burnout

Employees that get to choose the location and hours that best fit their outside commitments by definition have a better balance between work and life.

They have a healthier relationship with work, which can increase the quantity and quality of their output, but also means that when anything bad happens, they aren't so burnt out they can't handle it.

When we look at what a resilient employee looks like, research shows they don't actually take work as seriously as that outdated image of being 'on the grind'. Rather than working themselves to the bone, they have a work/life balance that helps them avoid burnout and manage any stressors that crop up at work.

4. Better workplace culture

Some businesses are staunch supporters of traditional work, like Google, which has claimed hybrid work would increase their costs and destroy company culture. However, Phil Jones MBE, managing director of Brothers UK, maintained in a statement to IT Pro's The Business Briefing that the office would be more about building social relationships and renewing company culture than before.

By keeping the office open for collaboration and social events (as well as those employees who prefer to work there full-time), businesses can uphold and even improve company culture. Fostering strong relationships means a more connected workforce that can present a unified front in the face of major change.

5. Stronger, more diverse pool of applicants

With increased value placed on flexible policies over other perks, it stands to reason that an employer offering flexible work will have more applicants for a job, from which it can choose top-tier talent.

You're also not restricting yourself to applicants in the immediate area. When employees don't have to come into the office, there's more equality of access for people who can't afford to live in bigger cities or who have family commitments, long-term illnesses, physical disabilities, or any other limitations on coming into work for the typical 9-5.

Preparing for the future

The pandemic highlighted how many organisations' crisis plans were too rigid to adapt to disruption as swift and enormous as COVID-19. The struggle to set up entire workforces for effective and secure remote work overnight made organisations realise just how much reliance they had on the office as the centre of work and network security.

How a business returns to work, therefore, will have a big impact on how it stands up to the next disruption. Through a flexible work policy, businesses stand to better retain their current employees and improve their overall happiness and performance, while also attracting the best talent from any location.

When your business runs on a strategy of flexibility, it and all of the employees within it will be much more adaptable to stress and major changes.

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In this week's exclusive feature for The Business Briefing readers, Sabina Weston looks at the ways gamification can make remote working feel more connected and certain workplace tasks less tedious, but also at the ways things can go south if gamification is used incorrectly.

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Google has unloaded a raft of new updates for Google Workspace that regear it towards hybrid working strategies.

The updates include greater support for frontline workers, time management capabilities and tools for strengthening collaboration.

"We're excited to announce new innovations in Google Workspace that will further empower all the ways work happens - and deepen its impact - in an ever-changing world," the VP and GM of Google Workspace, Javier Soltero, wrote in a blog post.

For frontline workers, the update takes into account the use of personal devices, such as the use of smartphones and tablets by hospital workers or retail staff. Google Workspace Frontline comes with all the necessary apps - Gmail, Chat, Docs, Drive and so on - but it also includes business-level support and security features like advanced endpoint management to keep sensitive company data secure.

There are also features within Google Workspace to build custom apps directly from Google Sheets and Drive, so frontline workers can collect data in the field, report safety risks, manage customer requests and streamline their work.

This bleeds into other feature updates for managing schedules and workflows as they evolve in hybrid strategies. In the coming months, Google will be releasing new calendar-based features that will help users specify working 'blocks' - indications in the calendar that allow teammates to see when they're online and available for meetings.

This includes 'recurring out-of-office events' which will automatically decline invites, and there will also be a setting to let co-workers know where a user will be during work hours, whether at home or in-office.

For engagement and productivity, Google is also adding features to minimise distractions, which will include basic limitations on notifications and 'Time Insights' that will provide information to employees - but not managers - about project schedules and completion times. Google Assistant will also be available to provide calendar details and also be used to join meetings.

Meetings themselves will be getting some new features, including a 'second screen' function for Google Meet where users can host a meeting across a mix of devices - hosting on one and presenting data or documents with another. This will also include a split-screen update for the mobile version on Meet, Q&A features, pools and live captions in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

IBM’s has added a new goal to its quantum development roadmap by pledging to speed up its quantum computing systems by an impressive 100x by the end of this year.

This means that Qiskit workloads which would normally take months to complete could be completed within one working day.

Although IBM didn’t provide an exact date when the speed increase could be achieved, the company that it would “release examples of this progress over the course of the year”. The goal is estimated to be met by the end of 2021.

IBM’s quantum development roadmap, which was first unveiled in September 2020, aims to integrate quantum software progress with the goal of speeding up quantum processing power and delivering cloud-based services that any developer can use.

As well as 100x faster workload execution, the company also announced that its quantum systems will gain the ability to run dynamic circuits allowing an increased circuit variety and algorithmic complexity. This will become available starting next year.

Moreover, IBM added that, by 2023, it will implement technologies designed on OpenShift to work alongside its quantum computers, resulting in an improved quantum computing experience that will be available to a wider range of developers through the cloud.

The tech giant’s focus on accessibility means scrapping the need to learn a new programming language or run different codes on separate devices.

“We envision a quantum workflow such that different types of developers can work seamlessly in the same integrated cloud-based framework. We call this vision frictionless quantum computing, and our team is excited to announce the Development Roadmap toward this future – where software and hardware advancements in tandem will extend the variety of circuits and expand the capacity of our systems to run circuits at a faster rate,” IBM said.

The announcement comes months after the company reached a new quantum computing milestone, hitting its highest quantum volume to date.

Using an upgraded 27-qubit client system deployed within the IBM Q Network, the tech giant achieved a quantum volume of 64. Its previous milestone, announced in January, was 32, which means IBM has successfully doubled its quantum volume every year for three years running.

IT is carrying the extra burden of supporting a remote workforce and the security implications that go along with it, while marketing is racing to serve the customer base and appeal to prospects across different touchpoints and devices. These teams have become the rebuilders as businesses strive to replicate their physical business with digital tools.

This means that collaboration between the two departments has become more important than ever – especially if you’re expecting to survive and thrive in the new business landscape. In our previous guide, we explored how Marketing and IT need to become the digital transformation dream team in your business. In this guide, we’ll explain how to help these departments meet their digital experience goals together during times of change.

Workplace technology is in danger of becoming its own worst enemy. In an increasingly digital workplace, employees whose jobs were once made easier by technology are now facing a complex array of products just to complete simple tasks. The workplace is in dire need of a digital transformation.

However, IT decision makers need to carefully choose the right solution that will provide a streamlined experience for all employees. This whitepaper provides strategies for conducting a successful digital transformation and mitigating the risk of an unsuccessful transformation.

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Box has revealed a slew of integrations and updates designed to help users manage and secure their workflows from anywhere.

The new features include integrations with Apple and Microsoft Teams, collaboration updates, and some new security and compliance settings within Box Shield.

Revealing the updates at the company's BoxWorks conference, CEO Aaron Levie said that it has never been more challenging for enterprises to both secure their data and keep up with the pace of business.

"Our vision has always been to provide a central source of truth for your content in the cloud," sai Levie. "At BoxWorks Digital, we're enhancing that vision with innovation that will make it incredibly easy to collaborate on a single platform that's secure, simple to use, easy to manage, and that extends to all the apps your teams use every day."

Earlier in the year, Box introduced a feature that allowed users to create annotations in the Box web app. As of Thursday, this feature is now also available on iOS and fully supports the Apple Pencil. With it, users can highlight text and images, or leave a comment on the preview of a document.

Box has also expanded its integration with Microsoft Teams with users able to choose a Box folder to be synced automatically with a Microsoft Teams chat group. Users can also instantly grant access to Box files from within Teams and receive Box notifications related to content activity.

With more emphasis on remote working, Box has also updated some security and compliance protocols within its automated security hub, Box Shield. It starts with a new policy exception feature, which must be opted-into at corporate level. It allows employees to suggest policy exceptions by providing a business justification, which is then recorded for auditing purposes. This is expected to be made available to Box Shield customers sometime next year.

The company is also adding event-based retention to its content lifecycle management toolset. With this, users will be able to retain and migrate files for a configurable amount of time depending on their business needs. This includes changing schedules for the migration of files after a client account is closed, a contract expires, or an employee leaves the company.

As organisations re-emerge cautiously from the global pandemic, remote working and social distancing remain in place. So the question for business leaders isn’t how to avoid disruption, it’s how they can navigate through it. The answer is by engaging their employees.

Employee engagement is how companies align their people and business strategies to become more agile and responsive. HR professionals play a crucial role in making this happen. But how do you cut through the noise, break down the barriers and get it done?

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To do, doing and done: that’s Trello in a nutshell. The tool is based on Kanban, a project-management and development method named after the Japanese word for “billboard”.

That’s a fair description of what Trello looks like: just as a community noticeboard will be covered in notices of events, jobs and announcements, so a Trello board holds lots of small “cards”. Each one usually details a single task, with your various cards grouped into lists to help keep everything organised.

Here’s a practical example of how Kanban works. When editors on our sister site Expert Reviews want to cover a product or news story, they create a Trello card and place it in a list entitled “Ideas”. Once the feature has been commissioned, the card is dragged onto the “Writing” list. When the copy is received, the card is moved into the “Editing” list, after which it will go into the “Publishing” list and so on.

What makes Trello so powerful is that there’s no requirement to follow a particular workflow. You can create as many lists as you like and structure your Trello board to suit your needs. That flexibility has helped Trello gain more than 50 million users, including large organisations from Adobe to UNICEF – as well as individuals seeking to stay on top of their personal projects. If you haven’t yet considered Trello, it’s time you did. Here’s how it can help you to organise your life.

Creating your account

Getting started with Trello doesn’t have to cost a penny: you can create a free account here. You’ll see that there are also Personal, Business and Enterprise plans at various prices, but for individuals and small businesses the free service may be all you need. It offers an unlimited number of personal boards, cards and lists, and allows you to attach files of up to 10MB to your cards. It also lets you create up to ten team boards, which can be shared between users.

Being signed up to the free service doesn’t limit your ability to connect to other boards, either. If you use Trello both at work and home, your login gives you convenient central access to all of the boards to which you’ve been granted access – including both paid-for and private ones.

Setting up a personal board is easy. Once you’ve logged in, you just need to click the plus icon at the top of the interface and give your new board a name when prompted. Your board will immediately appear. If, later on, you want to remove a board from your account, you must first close it (by selecting Show Menu | More… | Close Board…). You can then delete it by clicking the menu button on your Trello dashboard, followed by More | Delete Board….

New boards appear empty, with a prompt to create your first list. Enter a title for this and then move on to create as many additional lists as you need. When you’ve finished, click the “X” to close the new list dialog. Don’t worry if you’re not sure at first exactly how to structure your board as you can always reorganise things later. You can reorder lists by simply grabbing their headers and dragging them around, and you can add extra lists via the “Add another list” button that appears at the right end of your board.

Now you’ve got at least one list, it’s time to populate it with some cards. You can do this by clicking the three dots at the top of a list and selecting “Add Card…” – or you can click the “Add a card” link at the bottom. Once you’ve named a card, you can click into it to give a more detailed description, add notes, attach a file or link and so on. One particularly useful feature is the ability to set deadlines and reminders for individual cards: to do this, click “Due Date” from the “Add to card” menu. Once you’ve got several cards in a list, you can drag them into any order you like, and drag them between lists as needed.

You can also create new cards by email, which can be convenient if you quickly want to add an item to your board while you’re out and about. To make use of this feature, you’ll need your board’s unique email address: to find this, click More and pick “Email-to-board Settings”. Copy the address shown and save it in your contacts for convenient access later on. Note that this address is unique to you, so if other people have access to the board, they will need to use their own address.

You can now create a card by simply sending or forwarding any email to this address; the contents will be added to a new card, along with any attachments up to an overall limit of 10MB. You can set which list emailed cards are added to by clicking List under “Your emailed cards appear in…” and picking from the menu. If you want more control over Trello via email, plugins are available for G Suite and Outlook, which allow you to customise new cards from within your email client.

When a card reaches the end of its workflow, you can archive it from the main dialog menu that opens when you click on it, or from the context menu that opens when you right-click. Archiving a card removes it from the board, but it won’t actually be deleted unless you click the Delete button that appears on archived cards. You can review, restore or purge archived cards from the list that appears when you click Show Menu | Archived Items.

Use Trello Power-Ups

There are plenty more clever things you can do with Trello, courtesy of the plugins it calls “Power-Ups”. If you’re on the free plan, you can add a single Power-Up to your boards, while paid users can enable as many as they like.

As an example, if you use Slack to communicate with your colleagues, activating the Slack Power-Up allows you to click and drag Slack content directly onto a card. Other supported platforms include Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Mailchimp. In fact, just about any popular business tool will happily integrate.

Integrations can also work in the other direction. Every Trello board has a calendar, which records the due dates applied to your cards. You can incorporate these into Outlook or Google Calendar using the Calendar Power-Up: to enable it, point your browser here and click Add Power-Up.

Once it’s enabled, return to your board and click on the gear icon, followed by Calendar Settings. Click “Enable sync” and copy the calendar address from the iCalendar Feed box. In Outlook, you can now open your calendar, click Open Calendar in the Home tab, click From Internet… on the menu that appears and paste in the address you copied. Events from your Trello calendar will now appear alongside those already in your Outlook calendar. You can hide them by unticking the Trello calendar in the sidebar’s My Calendars section.

Google Calendar users, meanwhile, simply need to click the three dots beside “Add calendar” in the sidebar, then paste the copied calendar address into the URL box and click to save their settings.

Save time with Trello templates

We’ve mentioned that Trello can be adapted for any type of workflow, but if someone else has already developed a board that serves your needs, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Click here and you’ll find a broad selection of ready-to-use boards for jobs such as managing a marketing calendar, planning a trip, generating ideas in the early stages of a project and propagating a corporate overview.

Note that, although a template may be free to integrate, it might rely on Power-Ups. The Learn A Language template for example – created by the CEO of Duolingo – uses the Google Drive and Calendar Power-Ups, while the Etsy Order Fulfillment template uses the Dropbox, Custom Fields and Automate.io Power-Ups. As we’ve noted, free users can only use a single Power-Up so you may need to create your own workaround, or subscribe to a paid plan to take full advantage of Trello’s potential.

Automating Trello

A lot of what you do in Trello will be repetitive – and we don’t just mean dragging cards from one column to another. For example, it’s likely that you will have weekly or monthly maintenance tasks to perform, and when you create cards of a certain type you might want to give them all default due dates. However, rather than laboriously doing this for every single card, you can apply automation using Trello’s Butler Power-Up.

Simply put, Butler works on the principle of triggers and actions, as its developer Oscar Triscon explains: “Imagine having an assistant that can be instructed to react to your actions on the board. You tell him: ‘When I move a card to the Done list, please mark the due date complete in a card, add a green label and post a comment saying ‘@board I got this’.’ Then, every time you move a card to Done, those actions are performed on the card – as if by magic. You can set up rules just like that one using Butler, which is built into every Trello board. Importantly, you don’t need to know any computer programming: the rules are entered in plain English.”

There’s plenty more you can do with Butler: it lets you add buttons to cards and boards, create schedules and manipulate due dates. So you can, for example, configure it to create a series of standard cards at the start of each day or week, or add a button to your dashboard that organises all of your tasks by deadline.

It’s worth keeping in mind that free account users only have access to basic Butler actions, such as setting due dates, creating checklists and moving cards automatically. Paid subscribers get the full feature set, but Personal users can run only 200 commands per month performing up to 2,000 operations, while those on the Business and Enterprise plans get much higher limits.

Connect Trello to other apps

If Trello’s built-in automation doesn’t do quite what you want, you can use the IFTTT automation platform to expand its capabilities using third-party tools such as Evernote, Pocket and the Google Assistant. Get started by heading to and clicking Connect. Read what rights you’ll be granting IFTTT and, if you’re happy with them, click “Log in”, followed by Allow.

You’ll also need to connect the third-party services you want to integrate with Trello, assuming you haven’t already done so. To do this, click in the search box at the top of the screen, enter the name of the service you want to use – we’ll use the Google Assistant for this example – click Services and again click Connect to log in to your account.

Once you’ve connected both Google Assistant and Trello to IFTTT, you can then use the former to control the latter. Go here and click Connect and then customise the commands you can speak to your Google Assistant to create a new Trello card (see screenshot opposite). The “$” in the preset commands represents a spoken variable, which will be used as the title of the card you create. So, if you said “Okay Google, add tax return to the Trello list”, the card would be titled “tax return”. Scroll further down the screen, choose which board and list you want new cards to appear in, then click Save.

Convert Post-it notes to Trello boards

If you’re currently relying on a forest of Post-it notes for your project management needs, the transition to Trello shouldn’t be too difficult – after all, a Trello board already looks like a wall covered in notes. What’s more, 3M (the firm behind the ubiquitous yellow stickers) has built a handy feature into its free Post-it app for Android and iOS that lets you capture and digitise up to 200 notes at a time using your phone or tablet’s camera and export them directly to Trello. Download it here.

It’s also possible to send captured content to PowerPoint, Excel and Dropbox, or export it as PDF. You can scan things other than Post-it notes, too – but the app is optimised for square content so rectangular notes will be squashed.

Today’s consumers expect relentless innovation and products and services personalised to their needs, and in response, many businesses are continually trying to optimise processes and structures to gain competitive advantage.

Digital workflow solutions are the top way businesses can achieve this.

What are workflows and workflow management?

Digital workflow solutions are software designed to help automate processes in a business for greater efficiency.

A workflow is, at its simplest, the process of setting out the steps needed to complete a task or business goal, and a digital workflow takes this a step further by digitising and automating these steps.

Digital workflows can be applied to any multi-step process, like internal communications, financial auditing, or recruitment. The larger strategy of this process is workflow management, and it can be achieved by using a digital workflow solution.

The goal of this strategy is to eliminate unnecessary steps in any given process and automate those remaining, thereby streamlining many office systems and creating a single platform for managing these workflows.

Methods of digital workflow solutions

There are two different types of digital workflow solutions: sequential and parallel.

In sequential solutions, each task has to be completed before moving on to the next one, whereas in parallel solutions, certain tasks can be completed simultaneously.

For example, a sequential workflow for an audit may look like this:

Whereas a parallel workflow may look like this:

Both of the above templates are meant to be reproducible. The recommendation for workflows is not to use them once and discard them, but recycle them continuously as long as they’re not negatively affecting the process. This is beneficial in two ways: predictability and efficiency.

Predictability is beneficial because everyone involved in the process, from auditing and on-boarding to expenses requests and software development, knows exactly what to expect from the process. This directly leads to the second point, as the collective knowledge of processes makes it possible to deliver them in a timely and efficient manner, especially if elements of such are automated.

What are the advantages of digital workflow solutions?

Digital workflows bring the workflow process up to date. Whereas in the past workflows may have been planned and displayed on whiteboards and flip charts (or before that, blackboards), now they are created and displayed virtually in specialist workflow software.

Using digital workflow solutions has several advantages. Firstly, the very real danger posed by someone accidentally wiping clean the whiteboard - partially or totally - is removed. And, thanks to cloud backup the virtual equivalent of this - someone deleting a crucial file or the hardware it's stored on being damaged - is also removed.

Using digital workflow solutions also simplifies the process of amending any given workflow - additional nodes can be added, tasks can be renamed and linear processes can be made parallel, all with a couple of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Finally, digital workflow solutions that can be accessed remotely - through the cloud, for example, or via VPN connecting to on-premise hardware - also enable teams to collaborate effectively even if some of them work remotely or they're spread across several offices.

What are the disadvantages of digital workflow solutions?

Realistically, there are very few disadvantages to using digital workflow solutions. Most software will allow users to undo changes if something is deleted, modified, or added in error. Standard backup and recovery processes for the entire business should also mean that deleted files can be resurrected if they were removed by accident.

One potential pitfall, however, is overcomplicating processes. While it may be tempting to use a shiny new piece of software to map out the minutiae of approving a travel request, in reality a simpler workflow is preferable.

For example, this is detailed, but not very helpful:

This, on the other hand, contains all the necessary information, but is much clearer:

Additionally, not every task needs a workflow applied to it:

Even creating this kind of workflow - at least if humans are involved - is largely a waste of time.

Workflow automation

An ancillary benefit of using workflow software is it can help identify processes that can be at least partly, if not entirely, automated. Take the travel request example above: It would be easy to run a piece of software at the finance department level that identifies if a request is in accordance with company policy, rather than have a human review each submission. If the outcome is contested, it can always be sent for review by a real person but those occasions are likely to be minimal.

Many other projects, both large and small, will have points that can be automated that will only become fully visible once laid out in a digital workflow solution for all to see.

Some of the extremely mundane and repeatable tasks can be automated in their entirety - or near enough. For example, in the milk workflow above, an IoT-enabled smart fridge could automatically monitor the levels of milk it contains every hour and order more once the quantity dips below a certain threshold.

This could also potentially reduce wastage through artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, for example, where specialist software can be used to pick out patterns in usage (maybe less milk is used on a Thursday and Friday than on Monday, for example, so less needs to be ordered in order to replenish stocks sufficiently). We're a little way off a robot being the one that delivers the milk and restocks the fridge but never say never.

How to pick the best digital workflow solution

There is an enormous range of digital workflow solutions on the market, which means you're virtually guaranteed to find a product that's right for your needs.

Here are some things to consider when investigating the options on offer:

• What do you want to use this software for - do you have a test case, for example?
• How many people will be using the software?
• Do you want to use cloud-based software?
• Do any of your existing service providers also offer workflow solutions?
• How much do you want to pay and how do you want to be billed (one-off/monthly/annually)
• Do you need your workflow tools to integrate with your existing business software?

As with any investment, take your time to investigate all options available before taking the plunge with one.

We access, edit and print documents from a huge array of devices, running different operating systems and hardware configurations. We all need different things from our documents and the devices that display and print them. David Smith, CEO Landscape Printing Systems, discusses the key concerns for business customers when it comes to document workflow.

For more advice on transforming your business, visit HP BusinessNow