Leaving the Forecast Sheet Behind: Improving Organization, Efficiency, and Team Communication in Today's TV Weather Center

While the television weather center is built around computers and digital tools to forecast and tell the weather story of the day, many weather teams still rely on paper forecast sheets, printed checklists and severe weather plans stapled together to stay organized.

A multitude of digital organization and collaboration tools are available that can improve the daily work flow of the weather team. In this talk I will present how our weather team uses the free version of Trello to keep us organized, efficient and effective both as individuals and as a high-functioning team when we are in the weather center, home, or on the go - from our daily work to management of large projects and from staff development to holiday scheduling.

I will provide live, real-time exploration of how we manage our daily work including: forecast notes from shift to shift, issues with software/hardware, ongoing behind-the-scenes projects and development, team meeting agendas, continuing education work we do as a team, requesting time off and setting holiday schedules, and more.

I will provide live, real-time exploration of how we use Trello to make sure we are aware and organized on the large scale: from our overarching weather coverage plans and our responsibilities from shift to shift, including the different sales deliverables we are responsible for in each broadcast. How we stay organized about the usernames and passwords for the different systems we use, how we access our weather center remotely, and what the typical emergency steps are to bring different systems back online when they go down.

I will provide live, real-time exploration of how we use Trello to keep an archive of significant weather events in the DMA and how this can be used to easily and efficiently create year end content. I'll also explore why this area of our digital communication is an area we still have opportunities for improvement.

Lastly, I will provide live examples of how I use Trello as chief meteorologist to manage the growth and development of my team in conducting quarterly show reviews and critique sessions and end-of-year feedback from the team on my own performance and leadership.

******Additional Information for the chairs and committee*******
I did a multi-year stint as a director of communication for a large school district in the area between TV jobs. In that time, the structure of the organization required individual work units/teams to be digitally connected and organized. The district invested in its leaders to provide the skill sets to develop and create effective systems and processes to facilitate work at different physical sites across the 26 schools and multiple district buildings. In returning to TV, I found that the skills I learned have helped me to be a more effective leader and communicator and me team to be more efficient. I know that the system I have created in Trello, and certainly the concept of it, would benefit many weather teams in our portion of the weather enterprise.