Building Workflows in monday.com: Best Practices for Board Structure

[Music] hi there welcome to the building workflows in monday.com webinar

in today's webinar we are going to examine how to best approach building your workflows or use cases in

monday.com we're going to guide you through the considerations and questions to ask yourself to better define your

workflow goals before starting to build your boards the answers to some of these questions

will help you choose what is the most suitable board structure although it is worth mentioning there's no right or

wrong answer only suggestions of best practices in terms of agenda we'll go through a

quick overview of what is monday.com then we'll talk through some key terms so we're all using the same taxonomy as

we're going through this together we'll cover some must ask questions before jumping into building your boards

and then we'll go through some best practices for board building in terms of what structures might fit best for you

then we'll just wrap it up and you'll be off to the races so

first a quick introduction my name is emily williams i am an implementation consultant here at monday.com i've been

with the company for nearly two years implementing clients um of all scales so from a 20 person team to thousands of

people within the teams or company um and i think i've really found a way to understand what's the best way to build

boards regardless of the scale that you're working with or how many use cases you're working with so i hope that

we can share some of this information with you today um and that kind of leads me well into my goals for today so

first is that i think that this can really help minimize your learning curve of getting up and running on monday.com

and understanding what you can use it for second it'll provide a framework for

building in monday.com so if it's you know six months in the future and you have an additional use case you can use

this same framework and apply it to that even once you're outside of your initial learning curve

and then three it's going to save you time because it'll hopefully enable you to build your boards right the first

time so moving on to kind of the first thing in our agenda is what is monday.com so

if you're new to monday.com it's a work operating system that powers your team to run projects and workflows

with confidence so a really customizable platform that can fit any of your needs

whether you're managing a recruitment pipeline or you're a pmo team it can be built in a way that that fits your

specific use case in team the main building blocks of monday.com are something we call boards so i'm

actually going to jump into a real board here and show you kind of the core components of a board again just so

we're on the same page as we move through this webinar so jumping over to this screen

here you're looking at a board that i created so up here we have the board title

here we have different groups in order to group our items in the board so oftentimes we see groupings by not

started in progress complete or another popular one could be q1 q2 q3 and it can also be unique to your team

if you have buckets of categories um within your use case or your projects then we could group it that way

um within the groups we have items so each of the ones that i'm hovering over here is a specific item and against the

item we have columns that are tracking data points against that item so for example with item two my colleague

madeline is assigned to this she completed it and the date was november 19th so we can add on additional columns

as you see fit for your specific use case to in order to capture some key data points or keep your team

aligned and we'll talk a little bit more about that as well as we get into into the content for today

um so now with that we're all aligned on kind of what is monday.com in in a very basic fashion we're going to kind of

jump into the content for today i do want to mention if you have not watched a full basic webinar of

monday.com or or gotten adjusted to the platform in any way prior to this webinar i would recommend

going and watching a basic webinar before you go through this content and then coming back i think it'll set you

up for better success to kind of digest what we're going to talk about today with that i'm going to move on

and we're going to jump into the section of key terms so what are the terms that we're going to be talking about

throughout today and that you should be talking about with your teams and as you're building in monday.com in the

future so the first term is what is a use case at the most basic level use case is a

usage scenario for a piece of software so this term transcends monday.com right but the common use cases that we see in

monday.com are the three that we're looking at below so one is a data repository

what that means is i'm using monday.com just to track a list of my vendors right nothing is really happening in that

board it's just kind of a repository of information maybe asset management all of your

completed or available assets are living in a board nothing's really happening with them but you know you're housing

them there for easy access so anything that's pretty static um in living in the board could be labeled as

a data repository the second one is ad hoc task management and this is a very easy one to get up

and running in monday.com and really just means that you're managing your task list

individually or at a team level right so those are kind of the two basic use cases of monday.com

and we aren't going to focus on either of those today we are actually going to focus on uh workflows so within

workflows which we categorize as a use case for monday.com we're going to talk about two separate types so a process

workflow and a project workflow and i'm gonna go into detail on what that means you know you're probably asking yourself

okay what's the difference between a process and a project and we're gonna go into each of these in a moment but just

keep that in mind that that's going to be the focus for today so now i'm going to move on one slide

and we're going to talk about what is a workflow so at this point we're not even getting into process and project yet

we're just talking about what is a workflow so the way that we have uh defined a workflow is

a sequence of tasks so a path to describe how something goes from being undone to being done

so that probably sounds fairly vague right and and you might be trying to kind of assess

what workflows you have in your company um but let me give you a couple of examples right

a workflow could be a uh recruitment pipeline right we need to track our candidates coming in uh

through the pipeline going through the interview process and then getting to the hiring phase

it could be a legal request system we need to track all of the requests coming into our

company what we're doing with each request how long it's taking and when it's done so

any type of kind of system of working or something that needs to be accomplished

can be categorized as a workflow if it has a sequence of tasks if it's just kind of an ad hoc task again we're going

to bump that to the ad hoc task management but a workflow is more more structured

so now i'm going to go into the next key term that we need to understand which is what is an instance

so this might be the hardest one to explain so an instance is the piece of work you are tracking within a given use

case so remember we're focusing um on the the workflow category of use cases and

that's how these examples um go as well but let me give you a few examples of of what an instance is within a category of

of a use case so recruitment pipeline right that i just kind of mentioned

the instance within a recruitment pipeline would be the candidate right because that's what you're tracking the

candidate comes in you review the candidate's resume you interview the candidate the candidate gets an offer

right so they are the piece of work that is going from um undone to done in project management right what are we

trying to accomplish we're trying to finish projects so projects are the instance right there are multiple tasks

sometimes hundreds right within a project but really the thing that we are trying to accomplish is the project and

then same thing with the legal contract review the contract is going to be the instance there

all right so now we're going to dive into that distinction between a process and a project workflow

so the first one we're going to chat about here is a process workflow so what is a process

the set of tasks in a process workflow is predictable and repetitive you know what's going to happen from a to z

of course there can be areas where you deviate from a to z that's totally fine but in general there's some sort of

template or some sort of process that you go through in order to to fulfill that that use case or that workflow

so again some examples um below and another kind of key part of a process workflow is that you're often

handling a lot of these right there's a reason that it's a process because it's happened again and again in your

organization so you've kind of figured out a way to be more efficient and effective with those those

instances and that's how it's kind of become a process so again you'll see some examples on the

slide here but that's what we're going to categorize as a process workflow as we're going through this i would

highly recommend that you take a piece of paper or open your notes on your laptop and just kind of uh walk

through this presentation with me keeping in mind a use case that you're thinking about so

feel free at this point to jot down uh what use case you're thinking about and and you can do it after the next slide

as well but just kind of keep in mind your specific use case and try and plug it into what i'm talking about here i

think it'll help you help you have a good experience and take something away

so the next thing we're going to talk about is what is a project workflow so we've talked about a process and now we

are on to projects so project workflow um has a structured path similar to a process workflow but

each project may vary in the steps required typically the nature of projects is that you're trying to

fulfill a unique goal right so there may be 50 tasks that are unique to fill one

project's glow goal and 50 completely separate tasks to fulfill another project goal

so yes in terms of we have a project and we do tasks it's a it's a process in a way but all of the steps are unique and

there's not um you don't know what's going to happen from a to z

so that's the kind of difference between a project and a process workflow and again the instance in this uh project

workflow is typically the project itself so there may be some confusion as you're

getting into it and you're like okay i feel like the task within the project is is kind of the instance but what are we

trying to accomplish we're not ultimately trying to accomplish the task as a standalone item we're trying to

fulfill this goal of completing the project all right so i'm going to take a pause

here for everyone to catch their breath and again if you have not already feel free to note down the use case that

you just want to keep in mind as you're going through this and we're going to do a quick knowledge check so

we're going to talk about a few different um a few different

use cases and i want you to think about what they are and then we'll talk about whether you're right or not

so here we go um we have a sales team they're using a contacts board to log

their different contacts and information related to those people so think in your mind what type of use

case is this and let me remind you of the different options we have we have a data repository we have ad hoc task

management we have a process workflow and we have project workflows so i'll pause for a moment and give you

a chance to think about what this is all right so if you guessed data repository then you nailed it and we

started off easy so let's move on to the second one hopefully this one is pretty

straightforward we're just tracking a list of contacts there's nothing actionable happening with these contacts

other than you know updating if if something changes with them but we're not really tracking them in any way

so the next one is a creative team using monday.com to track the steps of creating a unique advertising campaign

for an upcoming product launch so what type of use case is this all right

so this is a project uh and there's a key word in here that gives us um a hint of why this is a project so

the creative team is using this board to track a unique advertising campaign so

if it is unique this means that they haven't done it before that they don't have a template for it it's just kind of

a standalone project so it's it's a project workflow they don't know exactly what they need to do they just know that

they have a unique campaign coming up and they need to manage a project for it all right

so the last one here a team of recruiters are using this board to track candidates as they pass through each

stage of the recruitment process so if you've been listening up to this point i hope that this one is going to be an

easy one for you and i'll give everyone else another minute or so to to consider it

all right so this is going to be a process workflow so you can see in this board

represented here that each item is an applicant again that's going to be our instance in this example

and we're tracking the process they're going through in the columns horizontally right and we're

going to come back to the structure later on but it's important to note that you can see that each of these

applicants are going through the same exact step time over time and that's how we know that this is a process workflow

okay so that was our knowledge check we're kind of moving into the next segment of

this webinar and that is kind of five must ask questions that you should keep in mind before we talk about the best

structure for your use case that you've already identified so again with that use case you've identified go through

these questions with me answer them and then that will kind of empower you to to

move forward so five must ask questions the first question what is your workflow or use

case so i hope that you guys have chosen a workflow and not a data repository or ad hoc task management um but

whatever you chose is okay as well workflows are just a little more complicated

so we've already talked about that and hopefully you haven't noted down the second one is what is your instance

so we've talked about what an instance is but at this time i want you to actually write down or think in your

mind of what that instance is that corresponds to your use case now that you have that

the third question is how many instances are you managing so how many projects are you managing how many

candidates in your pipeline are you managing how many creative requests are you managing

why is this important you're probably wondering so this is important because when you go to build your boards if

you're working at scale we might have some different considerations so if you tell me that you're managing thousands

of of projects versus 20 projects i'm probably going to advise you on a bit of a different structure so that's

why this is important to keep in mind am i building for scale or am i building just to have the best working experience

all right how complex is your workflow so if it's a process workflow is it truly i know

the steps a to z or is there always you know deviations from that and is are there conditional

you know activities that might happen so for example if this happens then we have to add

these additional five steps but if this happens we add additional a different additional five steps so that's one

level of complexity another level of complexity could be how many teams are involved right are

there a ton of different stakeholders coming in and out of this process or is it just your core team so

there's not a formula for defining complexity in workflows but i would just kind of consider what you're working

with and and feel out based on some of the things that we're talking about today

what that complexity uh seems like for you all right the fifth one is what are your

reporting requirements so are you building this workflow in order to give visibility to your leadership team or is

it really important for you to understand uh resource allocation within your team or to be able to report out on

how many of x y and z you're doing in a given month right so what are those requirements if any um this is just

important to note because there are certain ways of structuring your boards that are going to be more amenable to

certain types of reporting requirements so i think these five questions are really

important to keep in mind and you probably won't be able to nail down

the level of importance when you're building your first use case but i hope you know as you continue iterating in

monday.com and in identifying new use cases these questions keeping them in your mind you'll start to see why

they're so important um as you build more and more use cases all right so now for the part that you

guys have probably been waiting for we're going to talk about best practices for board building

so up to this point let's just do a quick recap of what we've talked about right so we've talked about a super

quick overview of monday.com we've talked about uh the key terms to know right so what is a use case

what is a workflow what is an instance so those kind of key key terms uh then we've talked about the key

questions to ask yourself as you're starting to build your workflow or use case so

that's kind of what we've reviewed up to this point and now we're going to take that information and we're going to

translate it into some of the best practices for board building so

three key ways to structure boards and we'll we'll talk about these more in depth later because you're probably

going to be like oh i've seen more ways right but we'll talk about how this can be scaled and how it can be simple but

there are three key ways so the first way is a vertical structure of boards

the second way is a horizontal structure and the third way is going to be a hybrid structure

so what what does this mean let me give you a quick overview before we kind of dive into it but

vertical structure means that you're tracking the the requirements to fulfill the instance

vertically down the board so let me jump back over to my board actually and kind of show

you real quick so tracking vertically down the board so

let's say i rename this to project a and this is you know task one task two

task three this would be a vertical management of project a

okay versus let's say i have in this separate group candidate one firstly i would

never have projects and candidates in one board but just for the purpose of this

and i'm tracking resume screen and maybe i add another status column to

track interview so here i'm tracking candidate 1 which is my instance

horizontally right so i'm tracking it across the item they go through the resume screen they're done now they go

through the interview we're done so this is a vertical management with project a and this is a horizontal management with

project uh or with candidate one so now you're probably like okay i get it vertical horizontal what's hybrid so

hybrid an example of hybrid at least i'm going to go ahead and add a new column here a sub item column

and let's call this candidate 1 and we're going to say overall

status and then we're going to use the sub items to track the steps so we're going to say resume

and we're going to have interview so you can see here that we're tracking the instance horizontally right we have

an overall candidate status and we're tracking different data points horizontally but then the process we're

tracking vertically right so this becomes kind of a hybrid between that vertical structure that we're looking at

up here with project a in the straight vert straight horizontal structure that i showed you previously

with candidate one so hopefully that gives you kind of a an initial understanding of these three

different options and now we're going to jump into um kind of a two separate sections of the best

way to structure boards if you're managing projects and then the best way if you're managing processes

so if you have identified your use case as a project then this next section is going to be relevant most for you

um so managing projects so again projects differ from each other they really follow the same exact steps and

typically the best practice for managing pro projects in monday.com is going to be to use a vertical structure right

that's what i just showed you where the project was the group name and we tracked the task

vertically or downwards uh in the different items so what i showed you was a vertical

single group option where i had one group per project the other option is a vertical single

board which is one board per project so let me show you what that looks like since we we did the vertical single

group so let's say this is define now we're grouping by phases design

we group the project by phases and this becomes project a the board title so our instance is now

the board and we're tracking the tasks vertically throughout the entire board through different phases

this is probably the most intuitive you know structure this is what people immediately think about when they think

about managing a project in monday and it's really great if you're only managing um

a small amount of projects right so if you're managing a large amount of

projects we might want to think about you know the group per project but we're going to go into each so these are the

two different options and now you kind of have them in your mind so vertical single group so

this is going to be the most ideal layout for um project management at scale right so

all projects are tracked on one board it's more manageable for a large number of projects let's think like hundreds of

projects right and reporting is simpler since everything's in one place it's very easy to do that roll up

so again this is kind of a visual of what that looks like right where each project has its own group and we're

tracking the tasks within the items and now we're moving on to vertical single board for managing individual

projects so this is the most robust and intuitive structure if you uh have a clear way of managing

projects you're looking at this and you're like okay we are a pmo team we manage

projects in a waterfall way with clear phases this is probably going to be the the best option for you for sure

so you'll have a board per project and later on the way that we can kind of elevate this

structure is by adding a high level project board where each project has its own item

and each project also has its own board so you can see a whole list or directory if you will of your projects that

correspond to an entire project board that's kind of outside of the scope for today's conversation but just keep in

mind that all of these structures can be elevated in

some way so again some of the advantages here is it's great for robust project workflows

you can drill down on multiple different levels and it's really good if you if you

utilize the dependency function um quite frequently cool

all right so let's look at what an example of this looks like as well so here is uh managing your project in a

single board vertically very similar to what we just shared on the

in the account okay so now we are going to move on to

processes managing processes so again in a process workflow the instance goes through the exact same

steps every time and i say exact but don't get hung up on that word if there is some deviation that is that is okay

we can account for that but typically a horizontal structure is going to be the best choice for process workflows

we'll show you both vertical and horizontal and i think in as we move forward with monday.com as

a product you'll see that you'll kind of work in that hybrid nature of a process as well

but typically a horizontal structure is going to be ideal so let's um

jump into what that means so cool ideal when the steps in a process are repetitive and repeatable

right so some of the advantages here is it's scalable for a large number of instances right we could have thousands

of instances on a board i keep going back to this candidate example right if we're a large

company with hundreds and hundreds of open positions this is going to be a really good option to have um one

candidate per line item we're going to avoid some account clutter by having everything very centralized we're not

going to run into any reporting limitations and we can also update each status column to have different labels

to really customize the process for us um so these are some of the the key

advantages so let's jump into kind of a view of this so one example is a sales pipeline

so you can see here we're grouped by new leads and active leads and each item here

the instance is what i'll give you a second to think about it the instance is the

deal right or the opportunity that that sales rep is working on and you can see that horizontally they're

tracking the different stages so qualifying demo stage negotiations and even in this example you can see

that they're using different labels in each column so in the qualifying stage it's done but in the demo stage it's

demo delivered so it gives you some flexibility in using those different different status columns

so let's show another example so example two we're managing a marketing workflow who is doing campaign

management that has very uh specific steps so each item here is going to be a campaign and it goes through the same

steps research creative copy etc and you can see that they've kind of added quite a few more things to this

horizontal workflow they have a due date for each status column they have a person column or a people column for

every almost every status column right so they're they're adding quite a few things to this workflow to accommodate

cool so now we've talked about kind of the um horizontal workflow for a process and

how that's typically the best option um that in combination with hybrid which we'll we'll talk a little bit about but

i also want to show you how you can use a vertical structure to manage a process as well if that feels like it will fit

your team more so here we have one vertical board for managing a process so

the advantages of this is when there are multiple data points to be tracked in a large number of steps to take so

if you have a process let's let's take employee onboarding for example i think this is a good example where a vertical

board could be relevant so an employee comes on board and they have let's say 200 things they need to do

in the first you know month right that's going to be really hard to

put in columns across the board and might overwhelm the employee but by giving the employee their own dedicated

board for you to manage with them with those 200 tasks vertically even though they're the same exact tasks that every

single employee is going to work through i think it would probably make more sense for them to have their own board

right so that would be a good example of even though it's a process a vertical structure could be

optimal cool here's an example another great example actually is events management so if you follow the same

process for events but you have you know 200 steps that need to be taken for an event um it might make sense to give it

its own board especially if you're not dealing at scale if this is kind of a a unique situation maybe you only have 5

or 10 or even 20 up to 50 i would say events of this size it might make sense to give them their

own board okay so now we are going to move into the

hybrid structure so this is arguably or not arguably i think this is my favorite structure

and i'll talk about why because i think it gives a really good combination of vertical and horizontal structural

elements so you can get the advantages of both and still have a very scalable option

so again what this does is it tracks certain points horizontally usually the instance right is tracked horizontally

think back to what i i showed where we had the candidate as the item and i was tracking the overall status in the

column and then i was tracking you know some of the steps in the sub items right i can jump back as well here's where we

were candidate one overall status and then we're tracking some of those steps in the sub items so

that's kind of the concept of of hybrid so let's take a look at a couple of

examples so a hybrid board for managing a process so here we have a campaign creation

board where each item is the campaign so again the campaign is our instance we're tracking some of the high level

tasks in columns on the high on the the item level horizontally and then you can see we have eight sub items that we're

tracking in in vertically right so this is becomes a hybrid structure

if you follow the same steps for each of these campaigns we do have a way to automate the creation of these sub items

so that your process can still be repeatable and you're not having to update each time but it is

generating in sub items so take a look at our automations if that's something you're interested in

and i'll show you these sub items expanded as well so here you can see these are the the eight steps that they

go through okay so what about a hybrid board for managing projects so this is a really

good option for managing a lot of projects right so you'll have each item is a project

and you'll track the steps to create to complete the project unique steps usually in the sub items so this is a

super awesome option if you're tracking a lot of projects if you answered to question number three

which was how many instances are you managing i would say if you answered more than 50

projects in a month i would choose either this option or a vertical single group option where we're tracking the

project as a group name but all the projects are still on the same board right

so again good for scalable management of projects you can see it's expanded here so

different from our process where those sub items were kind of preset these are going to be unique based on

the project that you're working on just just given the the nature of projects themselves

all right so hopefully you stuck with me through that i want to wrap us up with some some key points here

so summarizing what we've learned so first start by categorizing your workflow as a

project or a process so keep that in mind before you start working on your boards

answer some of the other questions to more deeply understand your workflow and your specific needs right we have a lot

of structural options and some of the answers to your questions can help guide you to one of those options like we

talked about today and then the third thing is just to decide if a vertical horizontal or

hybrid board works best for you based on your answers so

typically vertical is going to be better suited for project workflows or complex process workflows

horizontal will be better suited for process workflows or um or simple project workflows usually not

project workflows but if you have something very simple and then hybrid can be kind of the best of both worlds

right it's really good for scalable processes and projects so that is all i have for you here today

i hope this helped and kind of gave you a framework to move forward with in building your boards whether you're new

to monday.com or you've been working with the platform for months i think this is a a framework and a methodology

that can can benefit any user type uh so let us know how it goes and if this was helpful for you and hopefully we can

save you some time so happy board building and thank you for being here