Migrate from Accolade to Trello

Accolade Portfolios are top-level organizational containers with budget allocations and strategic alignment tags. We map each Portfolio to a Trello Workspace, preserving the portfolio name and description. Trello Workspaces are organizational shells containing boards; they do not carry budget or strategic alignment metadata natively, so we store these as Custom Fields on a designated 'Portfolio Metadata' card within the primary board of each workspace.

Accolade Projects are execution units linked to a Portfolio, with stage, status, owner, start and end dates, and custom properties. We map each Project to a Trello Board, preserving project name, description, owner (mapped to a Trello Workspace Member), and start/end dates as Custom Fields on the board. Accolade project stages (ideation, planning, execution, closure) map to Lists within the Board.

Accolade Innovations represent early-stage ideas with submission date, originator, scoring attributes, and workflow state. We map each Innovation to a Trello Card within the corresponding Board (derived from the parent Project mapping). Scoring attributes and lifecycle stage become Custom Fields (dropdown or number type). Originator maps to the Card member assignment. Workflow state maps to the Card's list position within the Board.

When an Accolade Innovation has been promoted to a Project, the relationship may not export as a clean parent-child link. We detect this pattern during schema analysis by matching on creation date, originator, and naming convention. We reconstruct the lineage by linking the Innovation Card to the Project Board via a Checklist on the Project Card that references the Innovation Card URL, preserving the original relationship for audit purposes.

Accolade Business Units segment portfolios for reporting and permission purposes. Where multiple Business Units exist with distinct custom property schemas, we map each BU to a separate Trello Workspace or, if within the same Workspace, to a Board Label. Multi-level BU hierarchies are flattened during export and re-expressed as a Board Label hierarchy (e.g., 'BU: Manufacturing > Division: R&D'). The customer selects the strategy during scoping.

Accolade supports user-defined fields on Projects and Innovations with types including text, number, date, dropdown, and checkbox. We extract the full custom property schema including field type, required flag, and picklist options. At import, we create matching Trello Custom Fields, subject to Trello's 25-character field name limit and its five supported types (text, number, date, dropdown, checkbox). Fields that do not map to these five types are stored as text Custom Fields and logged in the field-coverage report.

Documents and files attached to Accolade projects and innovations are exported with original filenames and MIME types. We transfer binary blobs directly and re-attach them to the corresponding Trello Card. Files over 10MB (the Free/Standard limit) are chunked during extraction and reassembled on the destination side with SHA-256 checksum verification. Files exceeding 250MB cannot migrate and are flagged in the transfer manifest for manual handling.

Accolade audit comments and activity history are timestamped entries linked to a project or innovation. We export these as a flattened feed and append them to the corresponding Trello Card as comments in chronological order, with the original timestamp and user attribution preserved in the comment body. This provides a readable activity history without relying on Trello's native activity log.

Accolade workflow stages with gate approvals (name, order, optional approver) are exported as List definitions within each Board. We create Lists matching the Accolade stage names and order. Gate approver assignments do not migrate as Trello permissions because Trello lacks a native approval workflow; we document the gate structure in the handoff inventory and recommend Butler rules or a third-party Power-Up (like Placker or EazyPaper) for the customer's admin to rebuild.

Accolade user accounts include name, email, role, and BU assignment. We export the user roster and map Accolade roles to Trello Workspace Member roles (Admin, Member, Observer). Active licenses and deactivated users are noted separately. Any Accolade user not found in Trello is held in a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision before record import resumes.

Accolade tracks quantitative metrics against projects such as budget consumed, schedule variance, and custom KPIs as numeric time-series values. We export these as structured key-value records. Budget and schedule variance metrics map to number Custom Fields on the project Board Card. Time-series KPIs (e.g., monthly variance) are stored as a JSON-attached card or as a separate Board dedicated to metrics tracking, with the customer choosing the approach during scoping.

Accolade governance gates with formal approval chains, conditional transitions, and multi-stage sign-off requirements have no native equivalent in Trello. We export the full gate definition (stage names, transition rules, approver assignments, and conditions) and document it in the handoff inventory. The customer's admin rebuilds these using Butler rules, a dedicated Power-Up, or an external workflow tool. This is explicitly outside the data migration scope.