Best Practices
The most common question when people are setting up their monday accounts is “what is the best way to organize this.” Businesses usually have multiple people in multiple departments collaborating on multiple projects. Do you organize your boards by project? By department? Do you make each person their own board?
The monday.com platform is flexible enough that there are no wrong answers and no one right answer, which is why choosing the initial organizational scheme feels so daunting. No one wants to choose something and then have to completely rebuild when scaling up reveals an issue. It’s also hard to get a straight answer from an expert about what is the ‘best’ way because sometimes it’s just a matter of opinion. So here’s out opinion. The image below is, conceptually, how we structure our project management workflows.
Our Design
Project Boards: These are the single source of truth for information about each project. The rows, or “items” in each board reflect the individual tasks which must be completed to bring the project across the finish line. The boards house all information, tasks, and updates for each project. Maintaining a single source of truth (SSoT) for each project is important to reduce the opportunity for error, increase efficiency, and aid future analysis.
Departmental Dashboards: These dashboards are a filtered view of the project boards, allowing each department to only see tasks relevant to their work, and are grouped by project. This reduces visual clutter as well as the opportunity for human error or altering another department’s information accidentally. Changes made in the departmental dashboards are automatically reflected n the project boards in real time.
Project Manager/Portfolio Board: This is the overview board for tracking the status of all projects in one place. A ‘connect boards’ link with ‘mirror’ columns summarize start/end dates, costs, budgets, project manager name, etc. This collapses managerial information from all of the tasks in a project board into one summary item in the portfolio board.
Executive/Planning Dashboard: This board processes the data in the Project Manager/Portfolio Board in real time to display the information in reports, graphs, charts, calendars, or any of monday.com’s other data reporting widgets. This is where the information is sliced and diced into a digestible format to help inform planning and decision making. Because the SSoT is the project boards, with information mirrored to the Project Manager/Portfolio Board, this dashboard can analyze and reflect the data in real time. No need to “run a report” or wait for a monthly update, the dashboard will reflect changes made in the departmental dashboards or project boards immediately. This can help you identify issues faster, and allows you to make decisions with the most up-to-date information possible.
Ability Ops is an official monday.com partner, and would be happy to help you design your workflow and build your workspace. Send us an email at [email protected] for more information.
