How To Use Trello To Manage Multiple Projects: 5 Best Methods

Project managers may often find it challenging to manage multiple projects simultaneously. With shifting priorities, tight deadlines, and the need for streamlined team collaboration, it is easy to feel overwhelmed.

Trello is the best project management software for users who need to effortlessly oversee multiple projects. Similar to an online whiteboard, it uses boards, cards, and lists to organize project information. The software's user-friendly interface enables project managers to visualize the workload in a way that suits them.

In this blog, we’ll provide methods on how to use Trello to manage multiple projects, with some tips for better project management. Let’s get started!

Lists help organize cards, specific tasks, or pieces of information according to their stages. They often facilitate a workflow where cards can be moved through each process step from beginning to end.

However, they can also serve as a space to track project ideas and information. This list structure is highly flexible and can be rearranged at any time to suit the changing project needs.

As a project manager, whether you’re planning your next project, managing multiple active projects, or collaborating with various teams, Trello boards can be very helpful. Separate boards can be created for individual projects.

Each project or team can have a dedicated Trello board, making organizing and overseeing multiple projects easier. The board serves as a blank canvas, offering endless customization options. Project managers can personalize everything from the background and color scheme to the columns that define each project workflow.

After customizing the overall look of your Trello board, it's time to start organizing your projects by adding cards. Each project can be represented by a Trello card within a board, providing an efficient workflow for managing recurring projects.

This offers a bird's-eye view of all your projects in one place, making prioritizing and staying organized easier. As a general rule, create one card per task. However, if a task involves multiple steps that can be grouped; you can easily adjust the cards to suit your needs.

Trello software allows you to incorporate color-coded labels for projects, making it easier to monitor the cards. For project managers overseeing a team of developers, marketers, or any other, they can create color-coded labels for each task. This allows team members to quickly identify their assigned tasks and tasks which are of high priority. 

Instead of creating every project board from scratch, project managers can also use a pre-made Trello template. A template is a document that already contains the essential elements, so they don’t have to start from zero.

Trello's project management templates come with pre-set cards to give a clear idea of the tasks you can manage. Using templates helps save time, ensure consistency, minimize errors, and reduce stress.

Here are some steps for creating a Trello board and cards:

• Go to ‘Boards’ and click on ‘Create New Boards’
• Set the ‘Board Title’ as the representative of the project and click ‘Create’
• You can also customize the background of the board based on your preference
• Click on ‘Add a List’ and enter the stages of your project there
• Next step is to ‘Add Card’ to the list according to the project requirement and stages
• Project managers can move the stages of the project just by dragging the card to the relevant swimlanes
• By clicking on the relevant card, a box will open in which you can choose the ‘Labels’ option
• In this, you can set the priority of the tasks, such as high, medium, and low, by using color-coded labels
• You can also set the due dates of each task by clicking on the relevant card and then selecting the ‘Date’ option and set the due date for each of the cards in the list

Here are some quick steps for project managers on how they can effectively use Trello to improve their work processes and achieve better project management:

Divide Large Tasks Into Manageable Steps Using Checklists

There might be a situation where a task has several stages to pass before moving to the next. For example, as a design agency, ‘developing a design concept’ can’t be done in a single stage; it requires several other stages, such as brainstorming design ideas. That’s why checklists are important. They keep track of subtasks within a single card, and multiple checklists can be added.

Monitor Due Date With Calendar View

The Calendar view provides a date-oriented perspective on tasks, enabling teams to manage schedules and deadlines effectively. This feature is crucial for coordinating project timelines and informing all team members about upcoming deadlines. Trello also offers different views, such as:

• Dashboard View: The dashboard view presents metrics such as due dates and assigned cards, allowing you to manage workloads effectively and avoid bottlenecks
• Table View: The table view provides a comprehensive overview of all the work across every Trello board in a spreadsheet-style list
• Timeline View: The timeline view illustrates the duration of tasks and projects using a Gantt chart-style, helping project managers to easily identify and prevent bottlenecks

Use Trello Automation To Streamline Your Workflow

Trello can automate tasks and workflow, allowing project managers to create custom rules and schedule commands to optimize the process. For instance, you can set a rule that moves cards to a 'Done' list once all tasks are completed or automatically adds a checklist to new cards.

Trello is a visual project management tool designed to help managers brainstorm, plan and manage projects, and work seamlessly and efficiently with their teams. It uses Kanban methodology, one of the simplest project management approaches, and can be used to manage multiple projects.  

Its flexibility makes it suitable for any industry, whether you’re in software development, professional services, marketing, or design.  

Using the methods mentioned above, managers can easily handle multiple projects simultaneously, as each project will be given its own space. Explore the list of others project management software that can be used by project managers to effortlessly oversee multiple projects.