we are already using Monday.com for project & portfolio management, but it is a struggle that Monday.com doesn’t have a status report function that is more than just different graphs. We want to have data in Monday.com that we can pull into reports to help drive adoption. Graphs just don’t tell the whole story.
We have a reporting format that is used in a fortnightly PMO meeting that we wanted to replicate. I thought I had hit on a way to do this using sub-items of projects in a portfolio, and text field columns that would be for function owners to populate their report data. And then I would pull that into a table in a Workdoc using the live connect function. Then once each PMO meeting is past I could create a PDF of the Workdoc, and save that as history. I would perhaps also create an automation to save the content of the text field updates as sub-item updates for history on the sub-item. So that way when the next report time came it would be OK to have the text fields over written.
Example of the sub items in the Portfolio with columns of desired data:
And then I found out that Sub-items do not have as much functionality as primary items. You cannot interact with them in Workdocs with the live data connection. And I am back to square one. We could keep doing this just in a PPT, but I was really hoping to drive more people to Monday.com and showcase it as part of these regular PMO meetings.
Is anyone aware of how I could either do this with the API, or an app or integration that would do this - allow me to fully interact with sub-items so I can use them to gather written status reports for presentation in a meeting. Thanks!
Not sure yet, we need IT approval for App installation, so it will be a bit before I can be certain. But from reading the description, it seems like it has potential.
Could you enter the updates in a different board and link the board to your portfolio board? Your project board is already linked, but you could have another board linked where these updates go and use a connected boards view on the item card in your portfolio board to see the same information.
My example is I have a portfolio risk register as well as a change log. I can summarize the risks & changes on the project level and click in for more details and/or I can add the connected boards view to my item card to see the specific items and even edit from there. This gets you out of the limitations of sub-items and makes it possible to create your monthly doc PDF without having to wait on app approvals.
Also important to note I have workflows that create groups on the portfolio boards and connect the items automatically that make this possible.
Hope this is useful and if you would like any additional details let me know and I am happy to provide them.
Have you tried the Board Reports Automations app? Might be exactly what you’re looking for. You can use the app with the free plan so you can play around with it to see if it meets your case.
Hi Kevin,
I’ll take a look and see if this would work for us. I need to have all integrations and apps approved by IT, so I will need to work off the documentation to see if that will work for us, before I can try it.
