Our company began using Monday.com back in April 2023 and we are using it for a multide of things such as:
Expense Reporting
Leave Requests
Travel Requests
Help Desk Ticketing and Response
Purchase Requests
and have had pretty good success with all of these phase 1 rollouts. However, I am currently working on our phase 2 plan, project tracking.
Here is the issue I am facing, we are a consulting company and we have a variety of different types of “jobs” that we track, each job instance is different and is created from a template of that particular “job code” in total we have hundreds of different job codes, and every instance of a contract with a client requires that we have a new project tracking board. This means that we have something like 7000 individual instances of project tracking in our current system. I have templates built out for our job codes, I have boards set up for our Contracts/Clients/Individual Project Boards and then I am using Rollup Multiple Boards to bring all that data to a master board called Jobs that will allow us to track our budget vs actual. However, RMB seems to only aggregate the data which doesn’t allow me to build very intuitive dashboards for our clients to view the status of their facilities. Maybe I am making this more complicated than it needs to be, does anyone out there have a similar problem or suggestions for me?
Your solutions sounds pretty well structured, and I think the issue you’re running into is fairly common.
I have a couple of comments:
Using separate boards for all the different projects is going to cause you some problems. This is likely why you’re using RMB. It’s fine, however it will make maintenance and dashboarding harder.
Using a single board to store all your templates and workflows (i.e. a “Tasks” board) would make it easier to dashboard, since you could use that data together.
Enterprise will give you better options for managing permissions and keeping sensitive data together on a single board. If you are interacting and sharing data with external parties, it’s typically a necessary upgrade.
The “Share view” feature can be useful. Do your clients need to view data only or also interact with it?
Managing task creation and connections may become more challenging, since you can no longer use the “create board from template” automation (assuming you are doing so now). Additional help from an integration with make.com will help you to manage these processes more easily.
Hopefully some of that offers some help. It seems like there are multiple problems to save and the solutions are bigger than a forum response! If you ever need some help, feel free to reach out to me directly via email (flyingravendesign@gmail.com).
This is something I have done a bit of thinking about and have not come up with a clean way with the way our business works to consolidate our jobs to a single board. There would be a lot of duplicating items and moving groups, not sure how that would function long term. Will put a bit more thought there.
This is not something I have considered, would you be able to elaborate on how this might function?
We are Enterprise so no problems there, I think our permissions are currently set pretty well.
Most of the time our clients will only need to view the information. There are a few instances where we will need them to edit (such as employee lists for training purposes) however, this can be done on connected boards easily enough.
Just responding to 2. as it’s the only one with a question.
In order to do this effectively with lots of automation (not always necessary!), you would probably need to engage an additional tool such as Zapier or make.com.
In general, the logic is as follows:
All like items (tasks in this case) are stored in a single database. Therefore anytime you want to change some functionality or add/remove automation or features, you only need to do it one time and the changes will apply to the workflow of all your tasks. Likewise, you can make dashboards easily based on this data (you are no longer drawing in from different boards) and monday’s connection and aggregation features work more effectively (you won’t hit connection limits or have to individually configure relationships with different boards).
You can store workflow templates in groups. When you need to use a workflow, you duplicate that group, update the data (such as timelines and assignees) and connect the duplicated items to a single project item in your high-level board. This creates a two-tier hierarchy.—This aspect is what you might want to automate.
In structuring your solution like this, more of monday.com’s features play ball and work for you, especially when you begin to scale. You tend not to need something like RMB if you structure your solution in this way.
I should qualify that a lot of this is my view. Others may think differently, but with monday.com’s MondayDB feature (larger, faster databases) coming next year, this also appears to be where monday.com is heading going forward. Note that I don’t speak for them!
It’s hard to speak to specifically as I don’t know the details of your solution. Though I’d be more than happy to book a consultation and collaborate on improvements to your solution!