As an older planner, I come from an MS Project background. It has it’s faults, but there are many good things.
I am really frustrated that I can’t drive dependencies from Sub Items to main Items, this makes planning larger pieces of work and linking them almost impossible.
When I do link tasks, I want to create a dependent task, add the duration and then let it work out the start and end dates - it doesn’t
I also want to be able to show the timeline of an Item with Sub Items as a derived field, I know I can do this as a separate field, but that can’t be used to drive dependencies to other Items.
It makes using Monday for waterfall / Gantt planning very frustrating (I know, I could use something else but we have Monday).
I think these are things that should be very easy to implement and would vastly improve the product. It is possible in Asana/Wrike etc… why not in Monday?
Hi Martin,
Transitioning to monday.com can definitely be painful, especially if you’re already familiar with other software. monday.com has its idiosyncrasies, and learning them does take time.
Here are a few pointers:
- Items and Subitems are best used for concepts that have a different hierarchy. Some examples might be: Parent items as Orders and Subitems as Products; Parent items as Bookings and Subitems as Guests; Parent items as Features and Subitems as Development Tasks etc.
Trying to mix subitems and parent items as the same concept will definitely land you in hot water. In a project planning context, I would recommend picking either subitems or items for a dependency chain. You can have parent items represent phases or have subitems represent checklist items for instance, while the other represents tasks that are in a dependency chain. - You can actually set the duration of a timeline via a numbers column by using a combo column template:
And don’t worry if you forgot to do so—you can connect your existing timeline column to a numbers column for the same result:
In general, you do need to learn a bit about monday.com in order to get the most out of it. When you shift your perspective from “why doesn’t monday.com do what I expect?” to “how does monday.com work and what tools does it offer me?”, you can build a better solution and find better ways to model your process.
I would be happy to book a workshop or Q&A session if you want some help getting monday.com to work for you. Always feel free to reach out.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the pointers, will try out today. It may be easier for me to use Groups rather than sub items, then everything is at the same level and can be linked. Where there are sub items, these will not then be needed at the main level. I will experiment.
I would like to learn more and will get in touch.