Best practice for changing the architecture of a board with live automations that message customers

Hello all, my company uses Monday.com boards to manage construction projects where each item in the board represents a project. We use automations to send emails and activate other work processes based on the values changed within an item (e.g. item “status” column is marked as complete which triggers an email informing the customer).

Our company is growing and we want to make some updates to the architecture (e.g. adding new columns) of our project board. However, we want to be really careful that when we change the board we don’t:

  • Break existing board automations
  • Lose data
  • Accidentally trigger erroneous messages to customers

Is there a best practice for making changes to a board while keeping a backup and avoiding triggering automations? The board has dozens of entries and we really don’t want to manually fill in a new board.

Right now our plan is to make a copy of the board as a backup, turn off all automations on the main board, and then make our changes.

Thanks!

Hello @zmiller1243 , The best practice is you mentioned already. Duplicate the board with “structure and items” and then work on duplicated board by turning off critical automations and keep 3-4 items data for testing purpose. Once you think the new board is Ready to live. Move the data from Previous Live board to new board. I hope it answers your question.