Our organization is a large State Agency, over 8,000 employees. My department has purchased the Enterprise plan.
Setup A: My initial setup was to make our Department the “Account”, then each Unit in our department would be the “Workspace”. Then each Unit could build their own Folders / Boards / etc. in their Workspace.
Setup B: However, after research it seems that the “Normal” setup for a company is to have the Company as the “Account”, and each Department as a “Workspace”. Then each Unit would have their own “Folders”.
Setup A worked well. It was simple to keep Boards separated, gave an extra level of granulation to each Unit for dividing projects, tasks between Teams. However, as word got around that we were using Monday.com other people in other departments wanted in. Using Setup A, each Department would have to purchase their own instance of Monday.com. Not a bad idea, as the purchase would come out of their budget. They could purchase as many licenses as they needed. But, if there was a project that involved multiple Departments how would that work? We can’t “Share” boards to Guests when they have the same email domain.
So I went with Setup B, and moved everything down one level and made our Agency as the “Account”. Now, with each Unit being a Folder we lose one level of granulation. We can create only one Sub-Folder. This means creating multiple boards. This really loads up the Navigation pane.
Plus, when creating a new Board, there is no option to save the Board to a particular folder. It only puts it in the Workspace. Then you have to go find the Board and move it to the correct folder. An extra action that is not efficient. If we had a option to create boards into folders it would really be helpful.
Any thoughts on setting up “A” or “B”?? I need to present this to the Leaders soon so we can roll it out live. I really need to make sure it’s set up the most efficient way.
For an organization of your size, on an Enterprise plan, I’d recommend hiring a consultant. It’s admirable that you’re coming on the forum and looking for solutions (I’ll post some pointers below), however, I’d strongly suggest that you engage a monday.com professional to guide your approach.
I’m available, among many others. monday.com also has plenty of partners they can recommend.
Pointers
I’d 100% agree that Setup B is best.
You almost certainly have too many boards. This is the single most common mistake I see people make with monday.com. Too many boards will have you running into limitations when you want to connect, analyse, maintain, automate, and even find your data. I think monday.com is to blame for this, because it encourages board creation and it’s one the most immediate, rewarding actions on the platform. However, using fewer boards and making use of filtered views and dashboards to find the right data will pay dividends in reducing your maintenance and creating ease-of-use across your organization.
You don’t necessarily need to segregate everything by department. You may have some centralized boards as well, for things like employee data. You could keep those in a separate workspace.
Using a Dashboard with a docked “Table” view is a really good way of pulling filtered data from a centralized board (database). This will help you to swap boards for dashboards in your solution.
There is a lot more to cover. Please feel free to reach out if you want to book a Q&A session and get some advice.
Don’t discount the idea of just naming workspaces as “department - unit”. Then you can create departmental “teams” in monday to grant access to the department workspaces.
While all of this is a little more cumbersome than having a department level account to restrict access to everything by department its still usable. With the right workspace configurations, each department will only see its workspaces (for each unit) unless the user is specifically granted access to other departments.
But I do concur, on a project this size you definitely need experts to help you get the most out of the platform. I’d also recommend you make friends with your internal IT and development teams - because in a state agency situation, integrations between monday.com and legacy systems seems to be an expected eventuality. While consultants may be able to develop these - they won’t be able to do so in a vacuum.