I’ve been using Monday for almost 3 years now and I’ve evolved how we used it several times with the advent of many new features being added over time. What I’d like to share is how I have been using Monday and what my current workflow is like. But first, let me talk about who we are and how we use it.
I am the Creative Director for a digital media company in North America. I run the Studio department and our biggest client is ourselves which makes us more of an in-house agency but in the last year plus I have been building us into a full Studio that services our clients as well. My team is fairly small (5 total in Studio) but my company is mid-sized (~200). What I needed was a way for someone to put in a request to Studio (that wasn’t in an email) and try to automate that as much as possible. A typical request will be something like this:
We need a :15 video. We need this logo, these images, and this copy.
Here’s what I did and how the process works:
- I created a Google Form for all Studio Requests. That form has a script in it that does several things once submitted. It:
a) takes the info in the form, and populates it on a corresponding Google spreadsheet
b) takes any assets that were uploaded to the form, creates a folder on our Google Drive with the name of the project and puts all the assets in there. It then creates a link to the google drive folder and puts that URL into one of the columns of the spreadsheet
c) emails the requestor, myself and our project manager a ticket of everything in the request form as a confirmation for the requestor and for a heads up/more info for me. - I set up an 18 step zap on Zapier that pulls all of the info from the Google Spreadsheet and
a) populates a new pulse on our main Studio Requests board with all the necessary info and URL links to both the google drive URL for the assets and an actual URL for the pulse (to be used later).
b) populates a new pulse on a private board called High Level Overview that I use during my weekly Studio check-ins with the team. This board is a very basic board that lists all active projects, who is the lead, what is the status, due date and that pulses’ URL from the bullet above so I can go directly to the project and find more info about it
The only thing I still have to do manually is to create the actual project on a shareable board that is linked to the High Level overview pulse. That way when the project is done, the designer checks the status column to done, it automatically updates the High Level Overview one. The next step for me is to have Zapier also create a new pulse on my private Studio Billable projects board where I keep tabs of our projects billing cycles.
Inside my boards, I have several automations set up that help move the projects along and alert different departments during the projects lifecycle. I also have the main board set up with our Dropbox account because we put all projects and final assets on dropbox. So the designer works off of and out of our dropbox structure. Once the files are in there, they’ll copy the link, post it to the pulse and the next team in line will get it from there.
No project management software can do EVERY SINGLE THING you need it to because everyone is different and how they operate/work is different. But I will say that Monday has been the most robust and best choice for us. They are also so responsive, they listen to the community and make changes/additions/updates based on user feedback. And that alone will keep me with them for years to come. I’m just happy that in the places Monday falls short or is not capable of doing what I need it to, they at least allow me to implement workarounds to get me 80% of the way there.
If anyone is interested, I can record a video to show how I actually do all of this and you can visually see how everything comes together for us. I will also update this post as I make changes and additions to my workflow (which I do periodically). If anyone has any questions or comments or want to know more about how I do this, I’d me more than happy to have a conversation. Hope this helps someone someday.
Push on til’ the day!
-JD
I’m sure many of our users here in monday.community will appreciate this knowledge and experience! Thanks again!!