Here’s a short story of how a boutique outsourcing cooperative can juggle between projects, cultivating its motivation to help clients and expressing its creativity by creating something in-house.

Let me introduce you to Assista. She will help your team not to feel the burden of time tracking. She will make it enjoyable to be mindful of how you invest your energy. No more start/stop buttons, manual time entries, and other wasteful activities. Just use Trello like you usually do by moving cards in-and-out of your “in progress” column.

The BIG BANG

Assista was born out of our own need. Like most service companies, our billing is based on tracked hours. We tried a lot of time trackers but nothing helped us to stay focused on our Trello kanban flow. We realized that we have good discipline to move trello cards in and out and thought — why not create something that can keep track of our actions in Trello and track time-based on that?

The first version was “amazing”, as you might agree 😅 , but it did the job. Of course, there were a lot of edge cases not covered. Like what happens when a user moves a card in the “in-progress” column, and another one joins. What if the former pushes the card out of “in-progress”? How can we track time for all card members?

Incubation

It took us time to see all edge cases, what are the standard team practices and how to address them. We started using Assista in all of our projects and train her. From big to small. Some of our partners began using Assista too. We even received our first manual yearly payment.

Incubating something in our collective is though. We’re continually experimenting with so many things that sometimes entropy hits us so hard that some things are left untouched for years. It was the same with our dear Assista. She lingered, helping us with so many projects and their billing that we completely neglected her needs. After all, she’s a lady that needs attention ❤. So at some point, she began crashing. The time tracking data she collected for some of our most significant projects (one was 3+ years) was so big that her database was overwhelmed and took a lot of resources to analyze it. We tried with small incremental fixes to stabilize some things, but soon it became clear that we need a different approach.

Dedicated growth

So we talked with Assista and tried to prepare her for the upcoming changes. The picture was so big that it baffled us. At this point, we decided that it’s a good idea if we somehow dedicate our attention and help Assista with her pains.

After a lot of discussions in our collective, how are we going to bootstrap the entire venture — we converged. We formed a team that would take ownership of growing Assista with good physical and mental health. It was evident that the team would make all decisions (sometimes with consent, sometimes with consensus), and everyone will try to support as much as he’s able from the sidelines. We formed a lot of small co-budgets to finance things, and the new Assista soon emerged better, faster, stronger!

It turned out that her family is big. It took a lot of people, combining their love and effort, to raise her. Some of them helped directly, and we had deep discussions are we going to measure that in some way. Slicing pie was helpful as a model, so inspired by it, we created our simplified version and captured all contributions in a simple excel sheet.

We’re happy that others are seeing the beauty in Assista and understanding how she can help. Their curiosity is evident from the rate of board installments in Trello. Just in one month, we reached 400, and we hope Assista will have the opportunity to help even more.

Having this wild journey in mind we realize that it has just begun. In this small blog article, I cannot express all sweat and tears, every nuance, and most of the highlights of our journey. I’m grateful to all who made this possible and will try to share the knowledge in next articles.

“Hello! I’m happy you read my story. I hope we see each other again and talk about what inspires you? In the meantime you can get to know me better:

From my Trello Power-up page

At my website

If you’re curious how to collaborate with me you can see the How to page