This post, Monday Work Management – My Notebook, contains a running log of my training notes with Monday Work Management software, https://www.monday.com.
The Welcome Page has initialization and setup tasks, including links to AI and templates (will investigate that later). There’s also links documentation and the help center.
Workspaces and Boards
Workspaces are the top-level parent in terms of hierarchy; that’s hierarchy for content, security, etc.
Note the toolbar in the upper right-hand corner:
That’s Notifications/Alerts, Inbox, Membership, App Marketplace, Search, and Help in order.
Within a Workspace, add Boards, Docs, and Dashboards Forms, and Apps. There are dozens of templates available:
First working with Boards, they begin with Organizing/Tracking a flexible entity (e.g., Items, Budgets, Tasks, and even a Custom Label.
Note the important security settings:
- Main: visible to everyone in your account
- Private: visible to you and specific people within your account that you invite
- Shareable: visible to you and external guests outside of your account
The Board is going to start the same whether choosing Item, Project, Task, or specifying a custom label. There aren’t special columns or major differences between the initial layout of the board based on the type of board chosen. There are only subtle differences such as having this entity name reflected in the UI or maybe starting with 1-or-2 different columns in the tracking tables:
See below, the label on the button, the name in the flyout menu. and the default “Files” column. The label on the first column is also reflects the chosen entity type being managed in the board. And, to that point, I can use a Board Setting to change the terminology for that item and those item-labeled elements are updated:
And, after the update:
To setup for additional evaluation, I’ve created an “HR IT Projects” workspace with a new project for deploying an HR Onboarding System.
Creating and Working with Groups
Groups are used in Monday to separate major initiatives, stages, or phases in a process or project. Using the Onboarding System, that may include: Business Case Development, Process Analysis, Development, User Acceptance Testing, and Deployment & Maintenance.
Groups can be renamed, dragged/dropped to be reordered, duplicated, moved in between boards, and exported to Excel. There are other properties such as color and the collapse state that can be easily access from the Group settings menu.
Adding Items
The UI for working with group-items is straightforward. Use the “+Add [ENTITY]” button to add new “items” within groups, and then the inline item-dropdown arrows to add sub-items.
Then of course, the items and sub-items have their own context menu with all the options one would expect from a UI like this: Delete, Create below, Copy, and Move
The “Copy item link” works such that, when utilized, the board is open, and it is opened with that item’s properties form visible. I used the “Requirements Gathering” link for example and that link opens the following (notice the form on the right)
As new items are added, they can be moved and updated in groups too. See when selecting multiple items’ select-checkbox, notice the “2 Items Selected” menu at the bottom. And, when updating the Status (for example) on “Requirements Gathering”…that same change was mirrored down on “Approval of Requirements”.
Not so much about “Adding Items, but Monday’s “Export to Excel” features are very powerful. To highlight, all of the boards and their items + subitems can be exported to Excel:
Task Assignment
To setup for task management scenarios, I’ve invited a second account:
After doing so, I receive an e-mail invite, accept and register. After doing so, I now have this new identity registered with my Monday tenant.
The assignee will receive an e-mail for every invite. Note that the multi-select checkbox for items works here too such that I can select multiple items and take a single action to assign many items at once. What’s also good is that this sends a single e-mail to the assignee instead of dozens of individual e-mails.
I can use the “My Work” feature to aggregate all of my tasks across boards:
See that checkbox too where I can “hide done items”.
Board Columns
There are dozens of columns of different types that can be added to board groups. This is just a snapshot which is only a small subset of what’s available:
There are drop-down types, date types, long text types, people types, timeline types, and more. The data type is critical because they impact the features-and-settings for dashboards and elsewhere. Meaning, for example, certain charts / chart fields only make sense for Timelines. Or, the start-and-end date of Timelines can be used to Automate tasks. Or, a People column (e.g., Assigned To) can be used in an Automation / Integration to send an e-mail when a status changes. And, so on.
Before getting into that – look at existing columns. They can be renamed by clicking in the column header, and each column also has a context menu flyout:
Some items will, of course, be specific to the data type. For example, with this “Person” column, the option to set a max number of people wouldn’t apply to a text column:
I think one of the most intriguing features for this (and all columns) is column level security. This feature is often requested in other process/content management systems, but is not always available…it’s a differentiator.
Columns can be collapsed, and the board can be filtered and/or sorted by their values. See collapsed “Date” below:
Some Highlights and Demos:
Time Tracking: this column enables a user to control a stop-watch. Something like this would be overkill in project management scenarios, but Monday is Work Management. There are so many scenarios which require this level of time tracking, think: Supply Chain, Repair Orders, Warehouse Picking Management and anything with granular “turn around time” requirement tracking.
The first image in this section shows the “Column Center” menu broken down into categories. That quick filtering is supplemented by search:
Notice that my search term is “est”, meaning estimations. Estimated and actual workload are common KPIs. Monday.com is very intelligent in how it uses Numbers columns for workload insights:
To expand on his, here is also a demo of Automations and the Formula column type.
- I added two Date columns: Started and Completed.
- I also added Estimated Workload and Actual Workload.
What I’ll do next is add an Automation to set the “Started” value to “Today()” when an item status changes to “Working on It”. Also, another Automation to set the “Completed” value to “Today()” when the status changes to “Done()”. Finally, I’ll take the the “Actual Workload” and use a formula to calculate the time difference between “Started” and “Completed”.
I’ll use the following Automation.
When I configure it, I’ll set “Status”, “Something”, and “Due Date” placeholders accordingly. For Example:
And, for Completed:
Of course, we could then take the delta between estimate and actual and chart that for accuracy and forecasting, and things light-up.
Also, recall Column Level Security. I could block employees from editing these columns manually but the automations would still work (kind of like an elevation of privileges).
There is also a File column, and I’ll get into Integrations later, but as a precursor, note that files can be included directly from OneDrive and SharePoint / MS Teams.
And, that “Doc” option is also very powerful. Monday comes with it’s own Rich Page doc type which is like a full featured blob page (Rich HTML controls) with other Monday.com widgets available to add like web parts:
Timelines and Dependencies
Two powerful columns in the realm of forecasting, execution, and classic project management are Time Tracking and Dependencies.
Read more about this feature here: https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007402599-Dependencies-on-monday-com
In my board, I added a dependency between the “Create the Business Case” and “Approval of Business Case” items. The dependency type is Finish-to-Start; the first most finish in order for the next to start. I then specified the “Timeline” field as the field to define their relationship.
Now, when I update the timeline in the dependent column, it will adjust to ensure that it respects the dependency. In this example, I added a timeline from 3/2 – 3/7. on the “Create the Business Case” column. Then, I added a timeline from 3/3 – 3/10 on the “Approval of Business Case” column.
So, what Monday does is compute that I needed 8 days for the “Approval” process, but it pushes the start date out to 3/8 (NOT 3/3) so that it prevents the overlap. There’s more to it than that in Gantt views, etc, but this is classic PM features in full effect:
Conversation Column
There is a full featured conversation column with tagging, rich text editing, likes, attachments, and more. You can even put inline todo lists. There is, of course an @ feature too for which recipients can configure on how they subscribe to alerts.
Continuing with Column Reviews
Connect Board and Mirror Columns
The Connect Board and Mirror Columns reminds me of a Lookup column in SharePoint. Select the Source and Related Field to display. The
First Choose the “Connect Boards”, and select the Board to connect.
Then, add a Mirror Column:
One of the greatest features of this column is that you can edit the related record right from the linked board. The displayed fields are editable inline, and then you can click the title to launch a modal with all available fields (and they are editable):
LOCATION COLUMN
There is a Location column too. Location will, of course, feed into Map Views (I’m covering views later). But, see below where I’ve tagged something Chicago, and if I click it’s pin then the actual item opens up with that editable Modal again:
Imagine this for some kind of shipping or dispatch UI. These boards can all be templated (yet another feature to be covered). So you could create a task form, have this location field on it, and then the field rep could fill out all associated fields. For each day, you could replicate the board and then populate it with the dispatch tasks.
BUTTON COLUMN
Previously mentioned, Automations above for setting dates when status change occurs. The Button Column is wired-up and ready to execute an automation. You can move items across groups, clear fields, set fields, send e-mails, and on.
FORMULA COLUMN
I provided an example of a formula field above, where the Actual Work was calculated by taking the difference between two dates. That was done with a formula:
Of course, there are multiple formulas available https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001235445-The-Formula-Column
The scenarios with formulas are endless…
Search and Filter
Search is extremely responsive, and basically does a text match search on all columns for the string specified:
Every column, I think, has some kind of filter available though the flexibility and and precision may vary. Location for example only has Is-Empty or Not-Empty.
Filtering is very robust and more details can be found here https://support.monday.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003624660-The-Board-Filters
Still pending: Views, Dashboards, Conditional Formatting, Templates, and more…
Views
Views are added through the Board Views option:
THE CHART VIEW
The default chart view for my Project Management template was count of tasks by status:
The Chart type, axis, labels, and more can be configured by going to the chart Settings menu option.
With just a couple of clicks, data visualizations and pivots are rendered. And, the chart elements are interactive and allow quick enter/exit for drill downs and split screens
FILE GALLERY VIEW
The File Gallery View stands out as a powerful feature because it combines files from file columns AND conversations. Files in a file column are obvious, but not so much for conversations. If you want to find out if a Conversation has a file, you have to open it. But, with this view, the conversation files are extracted.
Categories: Monday.com, Project Management
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