Streamlining Complex Workflows In Monday

Platform discussions Special workflows & use cases
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Early in our Monday.com days we learned we were sort of an odd-ball case for the service… which made our discussions and calls with our CSM interesting. Like a lot of teams, we came to the table with a huge basket of things to organize and just said “how”. And well, we struggled with our “how” until part of the team started trying a different solution. After many thousands of dollars and a virtual-office full of cries of “let’s just go back to Monday!”, it became clear that with these types of services, what is MOST important is:

  • Being flexible in finding your workflow- it may be the most important thing your business ever does
  • Using a software your comfortable with
  • Making it MANDATORY- then if it’s not getting utilized correctly, why?
  • A culture of improvement with the software you choose (with Monday it’s generally ask an ye’ shall receive!)

So then, how we organize the madness. Here’s our snapshot- we buy, renovate, rent, sell and then manage properties between us and our partners. In the buildup to using a different project management solution we had to get hyper-organized and learned we have about 103 processes that have to be completed in 3 different phases for all our requirements to be met on a single property… and next month the boss wants to sell 20.

Yikes… :face_with_head_bandage:

With that realization, we knew 1 board wouldn’t cut it, or we would be stuck side-scrolling our lives away. So we hammered the order into place and with improvements to Monday’s in-board search, board permissions which hide unneeded columns from viewers and the “hide” option for the rest… we got to a very streamlined solution that everyone understands. Finally! :relieved:

So then, here’s how we keep things in order.

Board A, where we manage all our Rehabs. A property stays in here until all the items in it are DONE and we’re just waiting on the paperwork…

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Then we move that pulse to the next board- all of the matching columns from Board A are moved into the new board, and we’re ready to start on the new items. You may be asking- why bother with the multiple boards? Well, each of these boards has between 20 and 30 columns unique to it. We can rearrange these columns from board-to board, hide non-essential info in later processes, trigger actions based on pulses moving in to the boards, etc. so it made a lot of sense for us.

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Once a property is sold, it then goes on to the next board. Nice and linear.

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Then that property just lives in that final board for all it’s days. All the updates and columns input from the beginning of the project on still live in Monday so we can always reference back if something comes up… no more hunting through email and texts! :joy:

Now that’s the largest facet of our Monday interface, at least at a glance. There are many automations, integrations, incoming forms, documents, etc. tied to and surrounding that. And, I should say, that is how it is for right now. The community on Facebook and, I suppose now here, have always been very good about sharing your ideas and what you do that’s working.

Who else has some suggestions we can learn from?

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Clean, direct and easy. Love it! We’ve only connected boards through look up columns - using multiple boards for workflow is a brilliant idea!

Another thing we’ve found particularly effective is column permissions which allows collaboration without stepping on toes. In this case, we’ve provided a board for scouting directors to decide on who will be attending this year’s Officiating Combine. The columns are locked down for the directors to both approve and rate each individual so we can come up with a list of invitees. Used to be done via XLS.
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That’s some clever lateral thinking as well! I think that’s one of the biggest challenges with a platform like this, just understanding all of what’s possible and what it means. Takes folks like us getting their hands dirty! :fist_right::fist_left:

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No kidding. I spent the first 30 days with our free account doing a deep dive into just what is possible with MDC. Trying to wrap my mind around all the things, how they could apply to our business, etc. Still learning new functionality all the time – for example, didn’t know you could hide columns with permissions. Great idea to have 3 boards with the same 30+ columns, but hide certain columns per board for easy viewing.

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@kolinhayes this is awesome! Unless I missed it I didn’t see how the pulse gets moved to the next board. Is there an Automation or someone that’s responsible to do it manually. If you’re moving and not duplicating are you worried that you loose information from columns in previous boards that are not on the following boards? We’ve never been brave enough to try this with boards that don’t have the exact same columns :see_no_evil:

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@kolinhayes WOW - seriously developed use case here! Thank you for sharing.

@cdann another great suggestion - those permissions are a great tool and I personally recommend them to our customers frequently. PS those officials are doing yeoman’s work out there!!

@Krishele great questions - you hit the nail on the head with your concern about info not transferring; this is the precise reason we do not have an automation that’ll move the item from one board to the next. It’s intentionally set so that if you’d like to move it to another board, you can do so manually, and in that process you’ll be forced to review any information that’ll be lost in the transfer. That way, you’ve got a streamlined process for reviewing that’s baked right into the transfer process. If you’re moving to another board that’s formatted in precisely the same way, there’ll be no info lost! Otherwise, a popup will appear showing you exactly what info won’t carry over.

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@Krishele just to add to @Kacey-monday.com’s response, we’re going to be adding cross-board automations in the very near future (by that I mean a few weeks’ time). We’re getting around the losing of information by using the mapping functionalities which you already have in our integrations. You will be able to map which columns and what type of column the information will move to in the 2nd board. The automation recipes which we’ll provide to begin with will be moving items from board to board, and duplicating items and then moving them board to board.

Excited to see these released and @kolinhayes I’m sure this will ease your workflow even more!

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There has been automations in the past but as a pulse being moved into a new group is essentially a “sign off” that it’s ready for the next phase, we did away with that so the team could approve of things manually.

Monday is very generous in warning you if you try to move pulses into boards without the same fields. Otherwise, you can build up from a handful of columns to several dozen like we do without worry. One catch- if you have to move something BACKWARDS. Be aware as that can delete data, so make a pulse as a note or be sure you don’t misplace that data entirely…

It would be kind of nice if you could convert data that would be deleted to an update on the pulse upon moving to a new board? :thinking:

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Are you meaning that you will be able to move a text column on one board into a people column on a separate board? Or a status column into a dropdown column in a different board? This would be phenomenal!

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Hey @Miltime19,

Yes! You’ll be able to map between different column types in the original board and the destination board. I don’t have more details yet on how it’s going to work but it’s going to be using the mapping functionality we already have built in our integrations.

Stay tuned for more information!

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Have these automation’s released yet?

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Hey @KimberlyDiVito

Right now, we have these recipes for moving items between boards.

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You will be able to define how to map the first board’s columns on the 2nd board when setting these up.

Would these work for what you’re trying to achieve?

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Hi @kolinhayes

Old thread, but I’m curious if you still use the same workflow. I see a lot of benefit to the method.
I’m working to connect pulses to a SQL back end, so in my case I’ll be able to move most of the “extra” data off platform and just bring it back when needed, but I was curious about doing something similar in a few places to consolidate interactions between the two, so it’s interesting to find that it has been used successfully!

Did you considered using the same columns across ALL of the work flow boards, and just exposing the data on the board where needed, so that it isn’t lost when moving backwards? Have you noticed any performance issues with the plethora of hidden columns?

Thanks!