Build Trello Work Walls for Agile Reporting

Trello is well known for its visual simplicity and intuitiveness. Anyone can open a board and instantly get a feeling for what it’s about, and how far along things are. This has led to a wide adoption of Trello as a reporting tool for every level of an organization.

We call these report boards Work Walls. They’re a collage of little windows into multiple projects, teams, and apps. The problem is, these walls are rarely up to date! Someone has to manually update them with progress, often minutes before the dreaded status meeting. And since nobody had a chance to look at the wall, half the meeting is spent just updating people. It’s a huge waste of time.

So in this age of agility and autonomy, how do we let teams self-organize without losing visibility on progress or adding management overhead?

Guide
In this guide, we will assume you want to aggregate some cards from a Trello board called Tribe into another board called Guild. You could just as well aggregate a GitHub repository, JIRA project, or any other app we support.

1) Create your Work Wall Trello board

In Trello, create a new board which will act as your Work Wall for the Guild board. You can add any list you want, but usually you’ll want something close to the lists used in the projects/boards you want to report on. You must create at least one list.
If you want to sync the card members too, you’ll also need to add your colleagues as board members.

2) Assign labels/tags

Open the Tribe board you want to aggregate into your Guild Work Wall. Assign a Guild label (or any other name of your choice) to each item you would like to sync between the boards. Similarly, in the Work Wall, create a corresponding Tribe label to identify cards that came from the Tribe board.

3) Create a sync between your Work Wall and the source project/board

Using the Unito app, create a new sync for each board or project you want to aggregate into your Work Wall (see limitations below).

Important: on the review tab, make sure to click on "Customize Sync." We don’t want to bring every card over!

4) Setup filters and field mappings

Head over to the "Filter Tasks" tab. For each side, add a label filter to Only sync cards with the Tribe and Guild labels, respectively.

6) Map your labels and lists

Open the Map Fields tab and expand the Labels-Labels mapping. You’ll want to map your Guild label to the Tribe label. This will translate the labels automatically.

Now expand the List-List mapping. If your lists have similar names, they will have been mapped automatically. Otherwise, associate the boards’ lists together. You can even map multiple lists to the same one to have a high-level view of progress on the Work Wall instead of the detailed workflow the Tribe might have.

7) Let the sync begin!

Go ahead and save your new sync. You Work Wall should now populate with any card from the Tribe board that has the Guild label. Go ahead and edit that card or move it to a different list, after a few minutes it will update in the other board.
If you create a new card on the Work Wall, it won’t sync to the other board until you label it with Tribe.

Recommended Unito Settings

Try out these settings to get the most out of your syncs:

• Add more labels and filters to mark different levels of reporting. Learn more about filters.
• Map the different users or each board or project so you can easily see who is working on what.
• Map your lists for more advanced workflows.