BACK TO ARTICLES 
There have been signs your company needs a better system than the whiteboard for months, even years prior to you reading this article. Alex went out of town and there was no process in place to update her on what needed to be done. “Maybe we can send her hourly pictures of the board?” “What if we have a live video stream?”
Yes, these are actually things Hüify discussed doing. Whiteboard dependency runs deep, but the first and hardest step is realizing you need help. Contemplating a video channel (which we have some experience with) for our to-do list was our wake-up call. The purpose of this post is not to convince you to abandon your boards and burn your dry erase stocks completely, but instead to address the fact that weaning your team off the whiteboard needs to happen in the very near future, and here’s why.
Growing Pains
As a startup, there are a few questions that form the foundation of every decision you make, one of these being “Is it scalable?” Growth is the lifeline driver of your agency, everything you do is in tandem with hitting the gas and accelerating this process. This almost always entails the majority of tools utilized by your team being cloud-based and easily accessible. Two things whiteboards are not.
Without realizing it, the whiteboard had been inadvertently stifling our company's growth goals of employing top talent outside of Wilmington if necessary and allowing members of our team to work remotely. Unless you were physically in the room, you had no idea what was going on internally. This was a problem, so we googled it.
The Virtual Whiteboard
Putting your to-do list online is nothing new, but the importance placed on completely making the switch is something we found to be highly underemphasized. There are dozens of platforms and apps that tout online whiteboard services, so we spent time kissing our frogs in a persistant search to find the one. Then we tried Trello.
*Cue angels singing*
Trello is an online collaboration tool that organizes projects into boards (yes, boards!) and subsequent cards for individual tasks within them. While in search of a virtual substitute, we were adamant about keeping certain “human” whiteboard elements––like everyone seeing when a teammate completes an assignment.
Trello keeps things transparent and easy to track (just like the whiteboard), and allows you to physically check off your task once completed. You can create checklists within each task and assign a team member and due date, which are all easily visible from the dashboard overview.
Kicking the Habit
We’re no longer reliant on a static element to guide us. We’re flexible, mobile, and growing fast. Trello presents a plethora of avenues to explore in regards to organization and efficiency, and it seems we uncover a different way to utilize the tool daily in collaboration with other platforms we employ––of which there are many.
This isn’t to say making the switch was easy or that Trello is perfect. However intuitive a tool may be, habits are hard to break, especially when they’re all you’ve known. We still love our whiteboard. It holds countless hours of strategy meetings, intensive brainstorming, and poorly drawn images of things that never actually look like the hive diagram you saw online. Those aren't things that suddenly become useless. It really did almost look like a bee hive that one time.
The process of whiteboarding a problem out with your team is something that may never be replaced, but the point is you have to adapt. You have to grow. You have to surpass the boundaries of your dry-erase safety blanket, or else go ahead and order your wide angle lens that can film the whole board. It's up to you.
