Overall Board Structure

FAQs
#1

I am new to Monday.com and struggling with how to get started on a project. I am wanting to create a tool for my estimating department to track projects. They will be working on 10 or so projects at a time with each project lasting 10-20 working days. We track each project through a 20 step process and different estimators will work on different phases of each project through the estimating process. In addition to team members within the estimating department, there are other departments that will occasionally be assigned tasks necessary to complete the estimate. How can i setup the boards to allow me to see an overall utilization of each estimator and a summary of where each project is in the process to help determine utilization and capacity. I would love to have a dashboard that visually displayed this information.

I am really struggling with how to structure the boards to allow for this functionality. All help is greatly appreciated.

All the best,
Clay

#2

hi @Clay

Welcome to the community! What I understand from your use case is that you need some sort of relationship between boards. So one board for each project and a possibility to report on all of these projects. There are several possibilities here, each with pro’s and con’s.

  • Use a dashboard. Dashboards are great to get an overview of information that is stored in different (in your case project) boards. It is easy to setup and can show lost of data (time, status, amounts etc) in many different formats (pie charts, stacked bars and so on. Before jumping in to that please have a look what account plan you are on as the max number of boards per dashboards varies from 1 (basic) to 50 (enterprise).
  • Create a master board. There are possibilities to create a master board that link to detail boards. You need link column and mirror columns. The link column can point to a project board and the mirror column aggregates data from the project board(s). In my opinion the disadvantages is that when you have 10 project boards and you want to report e.g. 4 columns (like status, estimated time, timeline and a number) you master board will need 5 columns (1 link + 4 mirror) per project. With 10 project this is 50 columns and the data is spread across these columns.
  • To overcome this I have written an app Master-Detail. This one also has a disadvantage (little difficult to set up) and therefore I am planning a new version which is easier to understand and use. If you want you can give it a try (10-day free trail period) but please contact me so I can point you in the right direction how to set this up.
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Link Multiple Boards to a Single Master Board
#3

hi basdebruin and thanks for the reply. Using one of the first two solutions, would the links have to be built with each new project or could a project template be utilized that has all of the links already created? Not sure this makes sense, but I don’t want to have to create links everytime we setup a new project.
Thanks again,
Clay

#4

Hi @Clay

Yes, adding a new project (as a detailed board) requires either modification of the dashboard (keeping the max boards in mind) or - in the second option - creating additional links.

I am currently working on redesigning my version of the Master Detail app where there is no need to do any manual work after adding a detailed board. Keep you posted.

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