Simplest solution to mirror cards into a planning board

[Lucy Nye]

This is one of those infuriating circumstances that seems so logical, something everyone Trello probably needs but I have spent days going around the houses with Trello and various plug ins to come up with a solution that should surely be so simple.

My company, a small creative agency, needs to view in one calendar all the tasks assigned across boards to the development team. The calendar view now released in Trello is ideal for this and I thought the simplest way to see all project tasks would be to use Unito mirroring to copy all assigned tasks into a Dev Planner board. But it seems are not up to date with the start date field  so any changes made in individual project boards aren't mirroring at all. In fact it duped an entire board instead of updating.

I thought the Butler might be a good alternative, as I really only need to update start and end dates between boards as tasks are shifted around and re-prioritised, but everything I find on this tells me otherwise.

Does anyone have any tips for a SIMPLE solution to organise workloads using the data entered into a Trello card? 

[Jillian Amyot _Unito_ · Accepted solution]

Hi Lucy, Unito employee here! Really sorry to hear our product didn't work the way you needed it to. The feedback has been passed along to the team, and if ever there was something I, or the team, could do to help you further, please don't hesitate to reach out :) 

[Lucy Nye]

Many thanks Jillian

My contact from Unito has reached out and offered to try this again and I appreciate the efforts. When you are up to date with the latest Trello releases I would be interested in trying again, my time permitting and I have detailed to her my anticipated (and needed) workflow. What I must stress is I cannot change the working practices of my entire agency to fit Unito in, it must fit in with our existing Trello practices. We also need some much clearer set up instructions because I really struggled with it and didn't feel confident in passing this down to the wider team. If I managed to duplicate a whole lists worth of tasks they definitely would! I think it is intuitive ONLY if you are not currently using Trello and are setting up everything together for the first time because a lot of my advise rolled back to 'try starting with a clean board'. My company has been using Trello for years and have templates and a process that works for us, I would just like it to work better to assess work across the company resources more holistically.  

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Accepted solution]

@Lucy Nye because the start date field is new, Unito doesn't currently support it, but it's planned to be released in the next few weeks I believe! It sounds like Unito would do what you want - what do you mean by "it duped an entire board instead of updating"? What was the expected vs actual behaviour?

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

I would recommend using Unito board sync to connect your boards into a master Dev planner board. The idea is to connect the relevant boards, and then set the logic - for example "all cards labelled with "Dev" should sync to the master planner board". You could have it all syncing one-way to the master, or set it to bidirectional so updates in the planner board sync back to the origin cards. 

Just to clarify, the functionality takes cards from boards and syncs them to a destination board, so you'll see a "clone" card being created on the destination board that is a true mirror. If you had previously manually copied cards to the planner board, unito won't link them together. The idea is to sync cards into an empty planner board so Unito is creating the cards on the planner board side.

[Lucy Nye]

Hi Hannah

Many thanks for your response. This is exactly how I expected Unito to react, but it wasn't that way in practice I'm afraid and the technical support was so slow I had to give up. When Unito is up to date and offers an international support system with responsive technical support I feel it might be worth the high monthly cost. But I cannot justify the fee to do something relatively simple that is a tiny portion of what Unito offers when it is so hard and unintuitive to make it work. We do not have an implementation manager who can spend months figuring it out, I had five days and too much of it was wasted with Unito.

Thanks!

Lucy

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

Hi @Lucy Nye
Thanks for explaining all of that - sorry to hear you had a tough time with Unito. Agree it can be hard to dedicate time to these sorts of things, and it can get tricky, especially if there are lots of moving pieces. I would have offered to help, but I'm based in NZ and my working hours are generally opposite to a lot of people! Generally, my advice is to try again from scratch with a brand new empty master board. Also, a real gotcha when connecting many boards to one and having it set to bi-directional is not having the correct rules on the destination side. So let's say you're connecting board A and B to the master, and you sync a card from A-->Master, what's stopping it from then syncing down to board B as well? So you'll need to make sure you have rules on both sides of the flow to ensure cards on the master sync back with the correct boards. 

Hope that helps! 

[Lucy Nye]

Thanks Hannah

I reviewed my workflow on a call with a team member (that I insisted on because I found it so unintuitive to set up and never got any indication or tips from the tool on what was working and what wasn't) and it looked to her like everything was set up correctly. But the next day when I found no dates updated and instead a whole list of cards were duped I tried to get help but it took far too long. It was nearly 36 hours later that someone tried to look at my workflow by which time I obviously had to delete it to try and ensure anything I was doing wasn't creating duplicates. I lost a day fixing this. It was a very frustrating experience and I felt utterly stupid that I couldn't figure it out. 

[milynnus]

@Lucy Nye 

As in using any OOTB product, features and capabilities are as defined in the product and by the wide support of its affiliates.

I found Butler to be a good automation tool which handles most of the automation requirements. The use of Power ups or other automation tool such as Zapier, automate.io...etc is common.

Butler has only one programmable exit in its HTTP Request.

While, the above, can be deployed to address your business needs it is equally important that you look at board(s) design especially in the multi board environment. In most cases, I prefer to deploy sync very selectively. I used time triggered programs to ensure the protect the integrity of the application. As you know, an accidental change of a list name can affect Butler.

I am currently working with a client on a design. If you like a tech consult my contact info on my profile page.

PS I would love to have Start date made available as a variable. 

[Lucy Nye]

Thank you for your reply, I'm afraid it went a little over my head! Changing the way we set up our boards isn't really an option though.

[milynnus]

@Lucy Nye 

Sure. Just sharing some experiences from working with clients. Some of your frustrations quite understandable - the de facto solution for sync is unito and mirror.