Team members “will be able to say to me, ‘You haven’t reviewed Katie’s paper yet’”. It provides a place to store lab ‘stream-of-consciousness’ Google Doc links. Trello also lets Bahlai get a ‘30,000-foot view’ of her group’s research. The units have rechargeable batteries, so one task on the board is to assign someone to find, test and charge the batteries. For example, for a fieldwork project to record songs of grasshoppers and katydids, her team needs to deploy audio recording devices. Using Trello, Bahlai can break tasks into steps and assign each one to a lab member. Trello, she hopes, can help seal those gaps. The team navigated the pandemic using a combination of Zoom and Google Docs to talk about the tasks that were ‘on fire’, but longer-term goals were continually falling through the cracks.
Big-picture project managementīahlai’s group investigates insect communities, including using sound to estimate population size. “I don’t think that helps people think.” Instead, he says, researchers spawn creativity when talking and scribbling down ideas together, be that on a phone, tablet, laptop or in person. “Ironically, a lot of these tools are about not having people sit in front of a screen all the time,” says computational biologist Mark Gerstein at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
KENDALL BIG TIME RUSH SOFTWARE
(Unless otherwise noted, the software applications highlighted here have a free option for academic and non-profit researchers.) These tools especially help investigators who lead groups in the range of 5–15 people, that do not have a full-time lab manager or administrative help and who need inexpensive software solutions (see ‘Six tools group leaders love’). When it comes to streamlining communications, organizing inventory and general project and lab management, group leaders often seek digital tools that go beyond the usual suspects of Google Docs, Zoom, Slack and GitHub. And, importantly, she can’t misplace it, unlike her notepad. “It’s the digitization of my yellow legal-sized notepad,” she says of her analog approach to tracking projects. The project-management software acts like a shareable, virtual bulletin board, and Bahlai hopes it will give team members a tangible way to keep their research moving towards common goals. So in May, she decided to “lay down the hammer and invite everyone to a Trello board”. “Slack is a not a great way to record anything for posterity,” says Bahlai, who runs a seven-member group at Kent State University in Ohio. But she finds the app lacking when it comes to managing the various projects her laboratory is working on - threads, ideas and long-term goals get lost as conversations and memes rush on.
Like many group leaders, the computational ecologist appreciates that her team uses the messaging app Slack for virtual ‘water-cooler talk’. Christie Bahlai felt as if she was buried under a pile of virtual sticky notes.
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