monday.com is a platform geared toward helping businesses better manage projects. That, of course, is only one aspect of the service. You’ll find it can also serve as a CRM, an ad campaign manager, bug tracking, customer project management and so much more. When you think of monday.com, you should really consider it more of a process manager than a task manager, because it can do so much more than your typical project management tool.
One area where monday.com shines is that of work management. With such a workflow, you can include the likes of:
- Project and task management
- Marketing workflows
- Finance requests
- Sales
- Design planning
- Operations
- IT requests
- Recruitment pipelines
SEE: Research: Digital transformation initiatives focus on collaboration (TechRepublic Premium)
With monday.com work management, you’ll get more done, reach your goals faster, be more flexible and be empowered to make better, more informed decisions for and about your business.
But how do you use monday.com work management? Let’s dive in and find out.
What is monday.com work management?
Before we get too deeply involved with monday.com, let’s first define work management. Essentially, work management functions to help organizations achieve a much higher operational efficiency by helping you keep track of projects and workflows, visualize data and empower collaboration between teams. Work management tools make use of automation and third-party integration to achieve this, and monday.com’s work management platform does a brilliant job of bringing it all together to form a cohesive whole that will help your business in ways you might never have considered.
Think about it this way: A good work management platform brings all the essential tools for managing workflows together under a single, digital roof. With all of those tools at your team’s disposal, they can work smarter, which means they don’t have to work harder.
With that said, let’s see how to use the monday.com work management platform.
How to use the monday.com work management workflow
After you’ve signed up for your monday.com account, the first thing you must do is create a new workspace. A workspace is a centralized location that houses all the tools you need to manage your workflows. Once you sign up, you’ll need to walk through a wizard that will ask you several simple questions (Figure A). One such question asks what you’d like to focus on first. Remember, the first part of the question is important, as you can always make changes after you’ve set up your account.
Figure A
Once you’ve finished the setup, you’ll find yourself in your new workspace on your new board (Figure B).
Figure B
Once created, your new workspace will only include two views — what those views are will depend on the choices you made during the setup process. In the workspace you see above, monday.com started me out with a Main Table and a Timeline view, which are very helpful, but not quite enough to satisfy my work management needs.
To add a new view, click + directly to the right of Timeline. This will open a drop-down list of other views you can add (Figure C).
Figure C
Let’s add a Kanban view to the workspace by clicking Kanban from the list. After clicking Kanban, you can then give that view a name or leave it as the default Kanban. Depending on your work management needs, you might need to add more views. Play around with adding and removing different views to set up the exact tools you need to satisfy your work management needs. You might find you only need one or two views or maybe your workflow requires the addition of all eight views and even a few additional apps. The important thing is that you customize your workspace to perfectly fit your management needs.
One thing to keep in mind is some of the views can be further customized. For example, the Dashboard view allows you to add and remove widgets to create the perfect visualization of your workspace data. After adding the Dashboard view, click + Add Widget (Figure D) and select from the list of widgets to add to the view.
Figure D
With your workspace field with different views, you’ll immediately realize those views aren’t displaying much in the way of helpful information. That’s because you’ve yet to start building your workflows.
One of the best views with which to start building your workflows is the Main Table. I have always found this view (Figure E) to be the easiest point of entry for monday.com.
Figure E
As you build your Main Table, it will fill out elements for the other views. For example, after adding new creatives to the Main Table, you’ll find them as lists in the Kanban view (Figure F).
Figure F
The important thing to understanding how monday.com work management flows is that you must take the time upfront to not only construct your workspaces exactly as you need them but to customize the views such that they will best serve your workflows. By giving yourself ample time to build your workspace before you start adding team members, the management of your work will be considerably easier.
At the same time, you’ll probably find as your projects and work continue to grow that you might need more than one workspace. You can create separate workspaces for each team or project and then customize those workspaces to better fit their needs.
Once you’ve built those workspaces, it’s time to start inviting teammates for collaboration. Make sure you invite the correct teammates to the right workspaces. You can invite teammates by clicking Invite in the upper right corner of the workspace. Once the members have joined, you can start assigning them tasks and they can begin collaborating on the workflow.
And that, my friends, is how you start your journey with monday.com’s work management platform. Separately, these tools make your project management flow with ease. Together, however, those pieces come together to improve your work management as a whole, which means your business processes will function like a well-oiled machine.
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