Collaboration and visibility drive project efficiency and success. When either of the two is absent, project dynamics are hampered, and success remains illusory. If you want to accomplish your projects on time and within the budget, you better pay close attention to these two factors. And it shouldn’t be that difficult.
Today’s project management tools put emphasis on visibility and collaboration and none, arguably, takes this approach more seriously than monday.com. This solution offers a visual collaborative space, allowing you to manage projects with ease and unprecedented visibility.
In this article, we’ll give you 10 reasons why monday.com will work great for any company, for the same reason that any company will do well adding a layer of visibility and collaboration to their operations. From project planning and streamlining workflow to time management and resource allocation features, monday.com adapts to a variety of projects, tasks and activities. Hopefully, after this quick read, you’ll have the insights about the usefulness and effectiveness of this software.
Project management is an indispensable activity across a company’s operations. Essentially, project management plays a fundamental strategic, and supportive role in ensuring that a business pursues plans for growth and stability in a way that is predictable, accurate, and profitable. The complex nature of project management puts a lot of projects at risk. In fact, 70% of organizations in 2017 had at least one project failure.
Projects, often require project managers to juggle numerous plans, tasks, and resources to deliver unique services, products, or results. The task is made harder by the fact that managers don’t achieve projects on their own. They usually involve a group of people from different organizations or departments – sometimes spread across multiple geographical locations.
Even more, breaking projects into bitesize tasks has become widespread. While the benefits of this trend outweigh the risks, it harbors a hidden conundrum. Apparently, with numerous tasks assigned to different people, it becomes difficult to manage all the moving parts. Besides, the ability to balance teams workload flies out of the window and pinpointing, who is doing what becomes a mind-boggling puzzle. It’s no surprise then that only a meager 40% are completed on time.
There are many challenges that can throw your project in shambles. Some of the challenges are unique for each project, while most are general issues that cut across project types. For example, inefficient project management in web development mirrors that in other projects. One study ranked inefficiency as the second killer for web projects in 2017. Is your project treading on the same shaky ground caused by these factors?
Inefficient developers
18%Inefficient project management
14%Ambiguous requirements
13%Scope creep
12%No sync between design and purpose
11%Lack of resources
7%Technology issues
7%Poor planning
5%Source: Armia Systems (2017)
Designed byTo wrestle down these problems, companies should realistically orchestrate strategies to project processes and execution. However, in a world where the remote workforce is the order of the day and with projects getting complex by the day, this is practically impossible without a robust project management software.
Luckily, there are many tools out there; some project management platforms are free while others come at a price. When it comes to premium project management tools, monday.com is arguably one of the most used solutions.
Below, you’ll find out why it is used by big brands as well as startups. It is that flexible and, in fact, you can see for yourself how it fits your workflow and requirements.
When it comes to type and complexity, projects vary significantly. Moreover, different teams have unique ways of accomplishing project tasks. As such, a project management software should be flexible enough to support a variety of operational requirements.
Flexibility makes monday.com inarguably valuable. With the platform, you can configure your tools to meet your specific management styles without compromising flexibility. The software enables you to distinctly manage all types of projects and workflows involving multiple teams with precision.
An agile project management solution at its core, monday.com promulgates kanban. Its boards are easily customizable and appealing to use. For example, if you are a marketing agency, you can create a board for all your teams including content creation, marketing, and social media posting teams. For each board, you can add columns that spell out all the details needed to get the work done.
The best part is that monday.com has columns designed to fit your specific needs. There are columns for status, date, text, numbers, people, ratings, team, location, and many more. The existence of numerous columns epitomizes monday.com flexibility and customizability. They provide a plethora of options, empowering you to customize each board to suit the way you work.
monday.com’s clean, visual interface adapts to various use cases, in this case, HR.
If there’s one thing that defines monday.com, it is visibility (it made it to the top of our visual project management software category). Here’s why it puts emphasis on visibility.
Tracking individual tasks, timelines, and goals for each project can be overwhelming. Primarily, when managing multiple tasks and diverse teams, boredom can take its toll, slowing down your team productivity. To combat this, monday.com has attributes that seem peripheral, but they are impressive and powerful in equal measures.
First, the platform has adopted a bright color-coding that makes everything visually attractive. The color scheme allows you to visually organize projects, view tasks, and track progress with a glance. You can see what stage each project is, what needs to be done, what deadlines are close, and more. Essentially, the visual color scheme provides a clear overview of your projects and keeps everyone in your team on the loop.
Secondly, monday.com provides amazing board views, delivering a layout that’s reminiscent of Excel spreadsheets. However, unlike Excel, the board views provide incredible features to group and search project data. You have a host of board views including calendar, timelines, files, Kanban, chart, and map views.
These views put digestible information at your fingertips, allowing you to see the big picture of every project. Particularly, the timeline view is monday.com’s version of the Gantt Chart. The view allows you to visually manage team members as well as their workload with unprecedented ease. Charts view provides analytics about your project workflow, allowing you to make informed decisions to boost productivity.
Together, the color scheme and the boards view create a visual and interactive workspace for project teams. For the project manager, they make it easy to map out milestones and see who’s working on what task and when. On the other hand, impressive views inspire team members to take the necessary action to nail deadlines and improve productivity.
Time tracking visually, as it applies on a monday.com dashboard.
Dashboards are handy tools for project teams and managers. Primarily, they streamline project workflows and keep project managers on top of things taking place on each board. Most importantly, they aid decision making, connects teams, and accelerate project delivery.
Monday.com dashboards embody the qualities that you need to drive projects forward. The dashboards collate information that is important to you and displays it in a single place. In other words, they give you a 360-degree view of the visual metrics and team KPIs. Particularly, the dashboards make it easy to track project budget, progress, and determine team member workload.
The best part is that the platform offers 15 dashboard widgets to aid dashboard customization. Some of the notable widgets include:
Interestingly, you can build a dashboard to include multiple widgets that display information from different boards. Besides, it’s easy to share a dashboard to a teammate and so is deleting them when projects are accomplished.
Battery Widget
When you are working on projects at an enterprise level, tasks can overlap departments and even locational boundaries. This offers an advantage in that you get the opportunity to work with a diverse team of specialists; thus, tasks are completed with expertise. However, getting all the talent on board and handling the project dynamics create a critical challenge. Primarily, it can be daunting for team members to know what is happening outside their immediate scope.
Fortunately, monday.com deals with these concerns straight off the bat thanks to its robust collaboration and communication tools. Particularly, board comments and tagging enables your team to communicate quickly and keep all experts that need to be engaged in the loop.
More importantly, monday.com has an update section that is reminiscent of a social media platform. The section ensures that all communication and files about a specific project or task are kept in context and a centralized place. Centralizing all communication ensures that teammates never miss vital information. Besides, the update section quashes the need for unnecessary meetings and the long email threads associated with project management.
What’s more, monday.com was designed to be more of a collaboration tool than a project management software. Although it does both, its collaboration aspect goes far beyond project management. This means once you set your projects rolling, the software becomes a permanent fixture in the way your project team collaborates and communicates.
monday.com allows you to delegate tasks and track project progress with ease. When you take on more complex projects involving remote teams, it’s easy to create a board for each project. Then, you can invite team members to join the board.
Once they are in, you don’t have to brief each member about the project and task. Instead, the tasks are inserted into the timeline and assigned to each member based on their expertise. The best part is that each task comes with a complete set of instructions. As a result, the whole team can visualize what needs to be done, and when it needs to be completed. This makes life easier for you and the team members, as well.
It gets everyone on the same page and sets up the stage for easy task and project tracking. Essentially, team members can provide feedback, leave notes, and set statuses like Done, not ready, in progress, or waiting for review. This helps you see how the project has progressed and enables you to manage everything at the highest level.
Most importantly, when the status is set, you get notifications via email or within the monday.com mobile app. This way, you can approve tasks quickly and even accurately predict where the whole project stands. This the reason why project management software is useful for teams handling complex projects, especially those that involve numerous tasks.
Drill down to individual tasks.
Effective project management begs for accurate, timely reporting. This because; as the project manager, you need to know where team members are in terms of the assigned tasks. On the other hand, you should keep C-suite stakeholders frequently posted on the timeline performance and project budgets.
When it comes to reporting, monday.com allows you to measure virtually anything. For example, you can see reports for progress, performance, and even almonds eaten by team members in a week. Unfortunately, the platform features no automated reporting. However, it makes up for this with an impressive ability to deliver a 360-degree view to analyze numerous project aspects at a glance.
There two types of reporting; reporting per user and high-level reporting. Reporting per user provides vital metrics on the teams’ performance. For example, if you are a sales manager these reports help stay on top of leads earned and track team progress. You can also analyze important results such as the amount earned, the commission earned by each salesperson, and determine how effective each member was.
On the other hand, high-level reporting allows you to accurately monitor multiple projects. Primarily, the low-level board reporting helps you track task completion in details. Alternatively, you can use the high-level managerial board to track general information like project milestones, who is in charge of a task, and determine if projects are delivered in time.
monday.com reporting, gives you that quick lookup.
Another reason why monday.com will work great for your company is its support for numerous use cases. Now, it’s good to note that many vendors don’t build project management platforms as one-size-fits-all packages. Instead, they focus on a selection of features and use them as a base for the application. Then, with customizability and integration capability, users can configure the platforms to suit their needs.
Earlier, we mentioned the platform’s flexibility and intuitiveness, right? If these qualities made sense to you, monday.com’s ability to support different use cases would not be a surprise. In fact, the platform will amaze you with its ability to naturally modify to suit different types of projects.
What we mean is that monday.com can be used for virtually anything, From managing teams, task, to managing all types of projects. Among others, it supports: sales management, lead tracking, bug tracking, church management and business process management. It also helps you manage remote teams, partner relationship, engineering projects, events, construction and work planning. Its other uses include video production management, client management, venture capital portfolio management and GDPR management.
Regardless of how you intend to use this solution, you’ll quite probably marvel at its capability. Its numerous use cases, coupled with its flexibility and customizability, makes it a powerful solution for your company.
Even better, monday.com plays well with all the project tools you use. This means; you can easily sync data from multiple applications to consolidate your team’s work. The software seamlessly integrates with tools like Slack, Asana, Trello, Google Drive, Gmail, Zendesk, Jira, Dropbox, Google Calendar, and Excel. Even more, it works smoothly with Shopify, Basecamp, Clearbit, Twilio, MailChimp, Github, Todoist, and Box. And to sweeten the deal, monday.com has plans to add Webhooks and Salesforce integration.
The modern workforce is constantly on the move. This because project team members must transit between remote offices and different client locations to get things done. For this reason, team members should have the ability to access vital project details from their mobile devices.
Monday.com allows your team members to switch between PC and mobile devices with the monday.com app. The app is available for both Android and iPhone smartphones. With the application, team members on the move have a workflow management tool in their pocket. They can easily see who is working on what, collaborate with other members, and even track project progress.
That said, even with the best-in-class features, if a platform cannot guarantee great value for money, it’s not good enough. Luckily, as you have seen, monday.com provides some of the best features. Also, the platform is reasonable pricing, which means it’s ideally perfect for businesses of all sizes.
The combination of great features and flexible pricing seems too good to resist. Currently, monday.com prices start at $39/month to $1599/month (billed annually). The vendor is offering an 18% discount for all subscriptions that are billed annually. The discount can save you a huge amount, especially if you have big teams. Even better, there is a special plan for NGOs, nonprofits, and education institutes.
Prices vary depending on the size of your team and the number of project management features. The best part is that you are free to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel your plan as need arises.
We have given you an in-depth look into the capability of monday.com. Hopefully, you have gained enough insights to decide whether the software is ideal to meet your project purposes. In case you missed any point, remember monday.com is flexible, visual, and interactive. It also features intuitive dashboards and has all the features you need to delegate tasks and track progress.
Above all, it supports numerous use cases, has multiple integrations, and it’s reasonably priced. The software ticks all the boxes and is inarguably one of the best project management software on the market today. Predictably, the solution will easily fit into your management style and support all operation requirements to help you achieve the desired results.
One thing we like about monday.com is that it offers a free trial to aid your decision-making process. If you are still hesitant or cannot decide for one reason or another, you may sign up for monday.com free trial to get a taste of what it can offer.
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