3 Ways to Track Projects in monday.com: From Simple Boards to Enterprise Portfolio

No matter what kind of company you are, if you're using monday.com to track your projects, I'm going to show you three

different ways that you can easily track your projects. So, let's jump in. Hi, my name is Tara and I'm a certified

monday.com partner and the founder of Simple Day. My goal is to help you build powerful yet simple workflows with

monday.com. If you need help with a custom implementation, my [music] contact details are in the description

below. Let's jump into today's tutorial and make Monday the best part of your week.

For this example, I'm going to talk about one of my recent clients. Basically, what they would do is rent

out different Airbnb properties, but what they needed to track within Monday.com was the whole process of

purchasing the property and then doing construction on the property because they all needed construction. and then

they had a totally separate process for actually renting everything out. So, we're talking about the process of

purchasing the properties and renovating them. And that's what they did within Monday. I'm going to start with the

simplest easy way to set up a structure for this type of scenario. The first way that you can easily track projects is by

using a board. You need one board and you have everything within this board. you have all of your projects and all of

the tasks that are associated with this project. So here you can see on the item level I have three different properties

that I need to manage. So three different projects. Here's some basic information of for them. Now on a sub

item level I'm going to add all of my tasks that I need to do. This way everything is in one place and I can

keep track of everything that I need to do for the project. To make this simple, I'm going to add two really simple

tasks. Obviously, I realize that purchasing properties is a lot more work than these two simple things. So, first

we're going to have finalize contracts and the second one is get a permit. Okay, so these are the two tasks that

I've added as sub items. Now, one thing that I can do is I can just have the status column. Actually, it would

probably be the other way around. First, I would do the contract and then I would work on the permit. So here you can see

if I open up the item, see all the sub items, I see the status of my projects. Now let's say I want to view all of my

projects and all of their status in one place. One thing that I can do is roll up the status column to the item level.

So click on the three dots and then choose show summary on the parent item. And here you can see that I have a

summary of what's going on in the sub items. essentially a summary of all of my tasks associated with this property.

Now, if I want to see more information, I need to hover over it and I can see it's 50% one not started, 50% working on

it. And as I add more tasks, this will update depending on the statuses. Now, what I like to do is I actually like to

add a progress column. I think it's a really easy way to track projects. So, I'm going to add a progress.

And here you can see that right now it's just telling me the progress is zero. Once I change this to done, so the

progress tracking changes to 100%. Now I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to roll it up to the item level.

So here you can see a summary. Now obviously on the sub item level just showing me this is 100% or zero doesn't

really mean much. But on an item level, I like that it tells me the percentage. So I can easily see what's going on.

Now, this is a really easy example and it's only 50%. But once you have a lot of projects, you can visually look at

this board, see all of your projects and see the status of every single project. So again, just to summarize, the first

option in managing projects is to have one board. All your projects are the item level and your sub items are all of

the tasks. Then you can roll up either a progress column or a status column. So you can easily glance at this board and

understands where every single project is holding. The next way that you can track projects is something called

highlevel and low-level boards. This is a pretty popular term within the Monday world. And essentially what it means is

that you have boards that are high level meaning you look at the projects at a high level and then you have low-level

boards which are your actual tasks. So in this example the highle board would have all of the properties that we're

looking to purchase and manage and each low-level board would be for the property and then we can link them

together. Let's jump in and I'll show you how to do this. In this setup, you see that I have one projects board and

my properties are listed as an item on each board. Now, I have two other boards, which we're going to call

low-level boards for each property. So, essentially, each property has one board. And the idea is that we want

these property boards to link up to this project board, which we're going to call the highle board. In order to do this,

you need to create a connected board column. I'm going to show you how this works. But before we jump into this, I

do want to warn you that depending on what plan you're in within monday.com, there are limitations. If you are on the

pro plan of monday.com, you can only connect 20 boards. So, in this example, what it would mean is you have one

highlevel board that connects to 20 different property boards. You can't do more than that. If you're on the

enterprise plan, then you can have up to 60 boards. However, if you're on enterprise, the third option that we're

going to discuss is actually even better. So, let's hold off on this if you're on the enterprise plan. So, back

to our board. What I want to do is create a connected board column so that way we can see the information in both

boards because ideally on the highle board or the projects board, we want to look at all of our projects and

understand what they're up to. I'm going to click this plus button and I'm going to search for connected boards and click

on that option. Now I need to select the boards that I want. I'm going to click on select. And in this example, remember

I'm choosing my two property boards. Now before you press this blue button, connect boards, it's really important to

think about this checkbox. It's called create a two-way connection. What that means is, do you want to see information

on both boards? Meaning on the projects board, do I want to see all the information from the property board? And

on the property board, do I want to see all the information from the projects board? That's called a two-way sync. So

here I am going to click on this button and click connect boards. I'm also going to add a mirror column,

which is a status, and we'll get into that in a minute. So here you can see I have two columns added. And if we jump

to our lower level boards, you can see that a column was also added here. And a column was also added here. So if

I go to the projects board 123 Main Street, I am going to change the board to 123 Main Streets and add my two tasks

that are here. So here you can see I'm connected to the two tasks. I'm going to do the same thing for the other

property. again, add the two tasks. Now, let's go into the Main Street board and like I

showed you on the other board, we're going to add a progress column because I told you I think it's a really great

column and I'm just going to change this to done. Now, if we go back to the projects board, so here you can see that

we have the different statuses, but I'm also going to add the column here. I'm mirroring the column to this board. I'm

going to click on these three dots and I'm going to click on duplicate column. And here you could see this is an exact

duplicate. And now I'm going to go in and change the settings. I'm going to click on settings and I'm going to

change this to be a sorry on the fort I didn't add it on for street.

So here I'm going to add progress tracking. Now I wouldn't be able to add this on for street because it's not

there. So obviously I would need to add that to the board as well. And here you can see that I am 50% of the way

completed with this project. Again, I have the same option that I can look at this board of all of my projects and I

can see how much progress has been made, what the projects are up to. So, I can easily manage the projects on a high

level from this board for all of the tasks. They're on the low level. Now, one of the downsides of having this

setup is that you need to manually connect everything. You saw how I went in and connected everything. There are

ways to automatically connect everything and it's called match automations. If you click on the link above, there's a

link to a video about match automations which helps you automatically connect projects. So, it can match the item name

to something on the other board and then it will automatically connect in these columns. The next downside of this

setup, like I mentioned before, it depends on how many projects you have. If I need to have 100 property boards

because I'm managing a 100 properties and I'm on the pro plan, I obviously can't connect all of them. That's why

we're going to jump into the third option. The third option is enterpriseoning and it's something

called portfolio. This portfolio feature is something that's relatively new within monday.com and again it's only

for enterprise on the work management product. So I'm going to show you from the beginning exactly how it works. I

have to click on this plus button and here you see I have the option for project and portfolio. So I'm going to

click on project and I am going to rename this to be called projects and I'm going to create

it. Now this is essentially creating my highlevel board that we just had but

there's going to be a lot more features. I'm going to add my first project. And you can see here that I have some

template boards that I can use. So for this example, if you're doing property management, you probably have the same

tasks you need to do every single time. So you can create a template and use that as your project. For this example,

I'm just going to create a new project, and we're going to call it one 123 Main Street.

And I also have an option of a resource planner. For this example, I'm not going to add it, but it's basically capacity

management, like understanding who needs to be on this project, how many hours they need to spend, what they need to

do, and it's connected to a project. So, here you can see I have my projects board, and what automatically happened

is this project is connected to my lower level board, one 123 Main Street. this portfolio. I know I called it project so

it's it's confusing but it's really called in Monday terms a portfolio which is all of my properties. Why don't I

just rename it? So here I can see all my properties and they're connected to each lower level

board. So when I go into 123 Main Street, you can see here that I have that same connected board column that I

had before, but it's all automated. So if I add let's say a new task that we have of get permit, remember we had that

task. You can see here that it's going to automatically connect for you. See it automatically connected. What that means

is taking out this whole option of match automations and making sure everything's connected properly. It's automatically

connected. Now let's go back to our properties board and look at this. Here you have something interesting. Now on

the one hand you have the same status column. Remember we had that status column where we saw all the statuses on

the lower level property board. We still have that but we have a few additional things. The first important thing is we

have this project health and I can basically track in the lower level project board or in the portfolio board

of all my properties what we're up to off track at risk or on track. Now what's really cool about this is that

this pulls into a snapshot. So imagine I had a lot of properties here. I can easily glance at the snapshot and see

where everything's holding. It's a much better view than we had before of just looking at the percentages or just the

statuses. I also have options here. I can look at the statuses. I can see a percentage. So here I automatically see

25%. I don't need to do the progress column. I can if I want to. I do have the option of adding actual verse plans.

You would have to add dates to that. And [snorts] I can also see who the people are. I don't have anything written here,

so that's why it's not showing up. You also can automatically generate a report about all the projects. And monday.com

literally goes through all of your projects and it generates a report for you about the status of all of your

projects. Now, one of the huge advantages of the portfolio feature is the number of items that it connects to.

I'm pretty sure it's about 100, but it actually changes all the time. And I know that the goal is that they're

supposed to get or maybe it's 200 even. I'm not even sure because I know that they're changing it. But the goal is to

get to a thousand. What that means is that you can have a thousand properties. I hope your business is big enough to do

that. But if you're working on that level, you can have a thousand properties managed all in one portfolio

board. You also can then have a dashboard that you can see all of the data from all of these properties.

Again, if we would set it up the other way with the highle board and the low-level board, your dashboard would be

limited because on the pro plan, you can only connect 10 boards to a dashboard. And on the enterprise plan, you can only

connect 20 boards to a dashboard. So, another great feature of this portfolio is you can have all of your boards

connect to one dashboard. So, you can gain a lot of valuable insights in one place. This is great for an executive

team that wants to see in the big picture what's going on. They can come to this properties board and see all

their properties, the status, everything that's going on in one glance. And they also have the dashboard. Just to

summarize, we spoke about the concept of having a highlevel and a low-level option to view all of your projects.

Again, high level is where you see the high level of all of your projects. Low level is all of the details like the

tasks. There are three different options that we explored in order to track this information. You either can have item

level and sub item on a simple board or you can have highlevel [clears throat] boards connected to low-level boards.

And finally, you can use the portfolio feature with projects if you're on Monday enterprise plan. If you're

interested in doing a deeper dive into portfolio feature, click on the link above and I'll see you there. Hit the

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Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.