Foreword a.k.a.
the problem

🎤 Toby Wilson, TrueBrow Co-founder:

"TrueBrow is an unusual use case. We have a complex business and trade internationally across 3 different entities. We organize and run live physical events, online events, sell physical products online that we ship internationally (and need to stocktake) in multiple currencies with different tax rates.

It's been quite difficult to find a software that can manage everything we need it for. Enter Fibery.

We have the need for a sales pipeline, CRM and we want real-time reporting across all of this. We offer payment plans in different currencies with different tax rates and want to be able to have the payment plans update automatically when we receive payments (in a separate system) and we also need reporting on failed payments that need follow-up. We also want to see what's outstanding for a particular customer group in real time at the click of a button and be able to click a button and see how much we've spent on shipping x,y,z products to a particular country. And we want everything to be interconnected."

That's quite a lot, huh? 😵

With Fibery TrueBrow was able to build a system that finally met all the above requests. Here is how they set up project planning and management in Fibery to keep the focus on what's important, increase transparency and save time with automations.

Read the text version or jump to the YouTube playlist where Toby explains TrueBrow processes and the system he built in Fibery step by step in 11 short (or not so) videos. All the titles are self-descriptive, so watch only what's important to you. 👇

Main part a.k.a.
the solution

Project backlog

TrueBrow tracks project ideas on a custom Kanban board (project = more complex plans like website redesign or new hire; opposite to the ad hoc tasks).

Here is how the project goes from the idea state to active work:

1. 🧍‍♂️ When a team member has a new project in mind, they simply add it to the Items for consideration column.
2. 🚶‍♂️ Once in a while, team members get together and discuss all the new ideas. Once they decide an idea is worth implementing and they want to go for it in the foreseeable future, they drag it to the Approved column.
3. 🏃‍♂️ The next state is In Focus, it's only for the projects that the whole company is focused on completely right now. TrueBrow keeps a limit on how many projects are in there in order not to multitask and finish things faster, so they usually take up to 5 projects. This state acts as a bottleneck: until the team finishes some of the in-focus projects, they don't add more.

But what if a project needs to be put on hold?

Sometimes a project is all planned out, work is in progress, there are a ton of tasks at different stages... and boom 💥, circumstances in the world or in the business change, priorities change and the project needs to be postponed for a month while everyone focuses on putting out spot fires.

What to do? Simply move that project out of the In Focus column and all the associated work will completely vanish from the entire system, from all views, regardless of their state or configuration. Gone.

Fast forward to a month down the track and you want to put that project back in focus... simply move that single project back into the In Focus column and boom... all associated work is back in all views across the entire Space exactly where it was, ready for everyone to hit the ground running.

In focus project planning

Tasks that were dragged to In Focus on the backlog appear in the separate In Focus Project Planning view. There is a rule tho ✋: projects will show up in this view only if assigned to someone who will lead them. Each project lives in a separate column and can be filled with tasks right from this view.

Here are some features that TrueBrow uses for the extra focus on what's important:

1. The duration of the project, the total work allocated to this project, and the due date are automatically calculated and displayed under the project's name. The team tries to keep project duration figures low, tho as you know anything can happen… 🦥 When the project duration gets longer and longer, the team sees it straight away and allocates additional resources to finish it.
2. When the project lead adds tasks to projects, they instantly see notifications about the missing fields (task assignee, time estimates, and deadline) and can add the required info. Toby also created a separate table view that displays all the tasks lacking information (deadline or assignee or time). It can be checked quickly for required inputs to make sure no delays are happening and should be kept empty at all times.
3. Task are sorted from oldest to newest, so older tasks are at the top and should be finished sooner.

Custom views for active work

It's helpful for Toby to see all the projects and all open tasks for each project on a single board to evaluate the overall workload and direction. But from time to time he just needs to focus on his own current tasks. 🧘‍♂️ For this purpose, he (and each TrueBrow employee) has a personal My Work board, filtered to show only tasks assigned to him. It's different for everyone in the team and shows all updates automatically in real-time.

There is also an Overdue Tasks list for burning deadlines management. 🔥 It shows all the tasks with a deadline before today and is the same for all team members, so everybody can share responsibility and help teammates quickly.

Active timers

When the team is remote, it’s handy to know what your colleagues are doing today or even at this particular moment. On the TrueBrow Work Space, there is a custom Active work board featuring all team members and their current work.

The task automatically appears there next to the person once this person presses the automated “Start Working On” button in the task. And vanishes when a person presses the “Stop Working On” button inside the task. There is also an automatic calculation of the time spent on the task and project so far, both in minutes and hours.