While spreadsheets, email, and whiteboards could suffice for very simple and small-scale projects, large and complex projects require a robust project management platform to succeed.
monday.com gives you all the functionality you need, from platform-specific templates, boards, and workflow automations to collaboration tool integrations.
Here’s how you can use set up a digital workspace like monday.com Work OS to empower your project teams.
1. Use project documentation to speed up framework adoption
Project documentation is the practice of recording key project details and documents required to successfully implement projects. If you are bringing multiple teams together in a specific project methodology, it’s important to make documentation clear and understandable for everyone.
With a Work OS, you can create, share, and collaborate on documents right from within your workflow—or larger workspace. On monday.com’s workdocs, team members can explore and understand in real-time the flow of a project and their part.
2. Create your roadmap and high-level project plan
A project roadmap is a visual, high-level overview of a project’s goals and deliverables organized on a timeline. This is an incredibly useful tool for managing stakeholder expectations, as well as for communicating plans and coordinating resources with other teams. Project management software allows you to create a living and dynamic document that everyone can easily access. Better yet, project roadmap templates like this one from monday.com can help you get started even faster.
3. Build an awesome workflow
Once you have a roadmap or some other form of high-level project plan, it’s time to get more granular with your workflows. This is crucial, as it makes it easy and intuitive for your team members to execute their work and for project managers to monitor and control project progress.
The advantage of using a Work OS over traditional project management software to build your project workflows is that you can start with solid templates and quickly customize them to accommodate different project methodologies, incorporate different views, automations, and more.
For example if you favor the Waterfall model, you can use what’s called a work breakdown structure (WBS) like in the image below.
4. Encourage ownership
On a more robust Work OS, you can add a People Column and easily assign ownership of tasks and subtasks to individual employees and teams—some project management software will only let you choose individual owners. These columns empower project managers and individuals to assign work and see it through. You can even implement automations that send notifications to task owners when a phase of the project is complete.
In addition to assigning task owners, it’s also a good idea to give each team member simple responsibilities like reporting on progress during status meetings and identifying their own roadblocks. This helps maintain a culture of transparency and builds momentum.
5. Get dedicated to data-driven decision making
Take your projects to the next level with actionable insights. Depending on which solution you choose, we included a few features that will help you get the most out of your data:
- Time tracking – this allows teams to see how long tasks take
- Customizable statuses – any stakeholder can see where your projects get held up the most
- Deadlines – holds every team member accountable to the project’s success
Once you’ve created different workflows, use them as a resource and easily create reports and dashboards. Assess project success against KPIs—this data can then be used to guide decisions or new projects.
6. Automate repetitive tasks to speed up project management
Automations can speed up your workflow for more efficient project management. For example, you can notify managers automatically when due dates are passed, create a new task item every week, and more.