Overview of Monday.com

- [Instructor] Monday.com calls itself a work operating system. A tool that helps teams collaborate, manage workflows, adapt to changes and run projects. It's an intuitive tool for managing work for sure, but its project management capabilities are thin. Workspaces help organize work. For example, you could have one workspace for client projects, another for internal projects and a third for managing technical support issues. Within a workspace, boards are storage areas for related items like a project or a team's meetings and action items. Monday.com has four types of views. The main table view shows tasks and sub items with columns of data. The Kanban view shows tasks by status, although it displays only tasks, not sub items. The timeline view is similar to a Gantt chart, although it doesn't show dependencies or a high level view of the project. And the workload view shows how many tasks someone is assigned to, during each time period. You can also display effort, if you create a column for that. If you specify a maximum effort per week, it will show over allocations. Within a board, groups organize your tasks, like product planning here. You can create sub items to break tasks into smaller pieces. One quirk is that the sub item columns don't match the task columns by default. So, you have to customize the columns for tasks and sub items separately. Task dependencies are very limited and awkward to use. You have to create an automation to handle dependencies and they don't work the way project managers are used to. Monday.com doesn't have any built-in cost tracking features. To manage budgets and project costs, you have to create custom fields with formulas to perform the calculations you need. To discuss a task or sub item, you click the chat bubble next to its name. You can at mention people to make sure they see a comment, or you can like someone else's comment. The interface shows how many views a comment has and who viewed it. You can also set up notifications by clicking the bell at the top left. Notifications appear in your inbox and you can filter what you see in your inbox. To track time, you add the time tracking column to a table, or you can add it to the Monday.com mobile app. You can click the right pointing arrow to start the timer, or you can click to pause. And if you click the cell, it opens up a time tracking log and you can record your time manually after the fact. Monday.com offers customization tools. You can create custom fields and add formulas if necessary. You can add fields to the main table, create status settings and configure view settings to tell Monday.com how the view should behave. You can also build dashboards quickly by adding and configuring widgets. Monday.com integrates with other apps like Zoom, Google calendar, Google Drive, Dropbox, Xera, Slack and so on, and you can import files from Excel. Monday.com has a few pricing plans, but you need Monday.com Pro or Enterprise to manage projects at some level. The basic version is truly basic. You can view work in a table or Kanban view, but no timeline or calendar view. The standard plan includes the timeline and calendar views, but it lacks features like the workload view, and time-tracking. The Pro plan, which is what I evaluated includes workload, time-tracking, formulas and more integrations, automations, and dashboards. It costs about $16 per user per month. Although the plan is set up in multiples of five users and is billed annually. The Enterprise plan adds features like account permissions, advanced reporting, single sign on and so on. Contact monday.com for pricing on Enterprise. Bottom line, Monday.com's interface is simple and easy to get going. With a little more effort, you can configure the settings and features you need to get the tool to do what you want. However, it doesn't support the type of scheduling and resource management most project managers need, and cost management is a do-it-yourself project of its own.