Trello co-founder Michael Pryor on pandering to power users, skyrocketing numbers, and the spectre of Microsoft Microsoft unveiled its latest crack at getting customers organised last month with Project Moca, but Redmond's scattergun approach to planning tools has left many a little confused. The Register spoke to Trello co-founder Michael Pryor about keeping things simple. "They have kind of a Trello clone called Planner," claimed …
Trello is nice but the pricing is steep, it needs deep discounts for volume. Most teams I've been in have one Trello mangler and then everyone else uses it as a todo list - that can't justify $10/month/person.
Wise words about features, I've been exposed to TargetProcess and that got called TragicProcess pretty quickly.
The thing that annoys me about Trello is that ever cool feature seems to have an additional cost. Plus you signing up to some other company for the feature.
The things that annoys me about Microsoft is they really do just fling stuff at the wall and see what sticks, and its half assed. Look at the new lists supposed to be a game changer not even got some of the features they have touted yet its in the roadmap... meanwhile hey here's another organisational half bit of software.
Dedicate those resources to just something like planner Trello would have been dead.
Instead how are you supposed to provide the tools for aiding staff get organised when there's a new tool each week and they're all not quite finished? Where do you get them to move across and adopt to?
Couldn't agree more, Planner, ToDo, Lists, Outlook Tasks (or is that ToDo now?) plus whatever the new thing is coming, what do you use when? Even MS advice articles on that contradict each other. Some integrate with Teams, some don't, but again not in a sensical way, arrrgh!
Planner could have been really good but its basically dead now, nothing on its roadmap - we tried to use it within our team, but our boss likes shiny reporting dashboards, Planner's built in ones are rubbish and integration with Flow (or whatever thats called now) is intentionally crippled so you can't even hack it into a Sharepoint list that can be easily dashboarded with PowerBI.
So we are stuck with our current "method" of putting all our activities into a Shared Calendar on Outlook, exporting that to Excel once a month, and hacking that into the pretty pictures our boss wants to see...
"Developers," he said, "add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff..."
Indeed. Borkzilla has been doing that since the dawn of computing. Remember when they wanted to make RSS more rich-texty ? RSS works fine as it is, leave it alone.
Really, sometimes I think there's a PHB who just wants to be able to say that he headed a project.
A good program is a program that does what the user actually needs. When you get to that point, take a step back and beware any modifications. Bells and whistles may be nice to have, but if they impede the primary function, they are an impediment and should be dropped.
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