monday.com Project Management Explained (Basic to Advanced)

What Is The Simplest Way To Manage Projects In monday.com?

A single to-do list board: one board of tasks with three groups, To Do, Doing and Done, and automations that move each task into the matching group when its status changes. It works for any list of tasks a few people share, whether they belong to a project or not.

1. Press the plus button, choose Board, then Create board manually. Name it To Do List, set the items to Tasks and leave privacy on Main, or choose Private to limit it to you and selected people.
2. Rename the default groups and add a third, so you have To Do Tasks, Doing Tasks and Done Tasks. We make To Do grey, because every new task starts there, and Done green.
3. Click into the status column, choose Edit labels and make To Do the default label. Rename the orange label to Doing in the colour of its group, keep Done (and Stuck if you want it), then press Apply.
4. Go to Automate in the top right, then Manage and Create automation. Build when status changes to To Do, move item to group To Do Tasks, then repeat it for Doing and Done.
5. Add columns from the plus button on the far right: a long text column (under More columns) for the task description, a priority column and a status column for task type, such as Marketing, Sales and Operations.
6. Rename the date column to Due date, open its three dots, go to Settings and choose Set as deadline. Connect it to the status and person columns and press Connect columns.

Once it's connected, a task with a future due date shows a circle that fills in as the date gets closer, an overdue task shows a warning sign, and a task set to Done shows a tick.

Keep green for Done. monday.com assumes a green label means the task is done, so avoid it for other labels such as task types.

To give someone their own list, use the dropdown arrow beside Filter to show only tasks where Person is that person, or Me (dynamic), which shows whoever is logged in their own tasks. Use Save as new view and rename it, and the main table still shows every task.

How Do You Create A Project Template In monday.com?

Build one board for a single project, with a group per phase, then save it as a template so every new project starts from a copy with the same tasks already in place.

Here the groups are phases, not statuses, so tasks stay in their phase when their status changes. Phases can be numbered or named, such as onboarding, scoping, initial development, feedback and training.

1. Create a board for one project with the items set to Tasks, add a group for each phase and fill each phase with the tasks it always needs, whether that's five or 20.
2. Use To Do, Doing and Done as the status labels, keeping Stuck if you want it. Add a status column for task type, such as finance, admin or sales, and a long text column for the task description.
3. Replace the date column with a timeline column, as tasks often span several days. In its settings, untick weekends if you work a five-day week, and use Set as deadline with the person and status columns.
4. Fill in whatever is the same on every project, such as each task's type and description. Leave the timeline and person blank, because start dates differ and more than one person may be able to do a task.
5. Click the three dots on the board and choose Save as template. Name it after the project or the type of engagement it's for, choose whether to make it a managed template, then press Save template.
6. Press Use template to create the next project's board, and rename it straight away.

A managed template pushes later changes to the boards already made from it, as well as to new ones. With a normal template, a change only reaches boards created after it.

Creating the board can be automated too: when an opportunity's status changes to closed won, an automation can create a board from the template with the opportunity's name in it.

How Do You Set Up A Projects Board & Tasks Board In monday.com?

Create two boards, a projects board listing every project (the high level) and a tasks board holding every task (the low level), and link them with a two-way Connect boards column. All your projects sit on one board instead of one board each, which we find cleaner.

On the projects board, the groups are stages: New, Onboarding, Active, Completed and Cancelled or Postponed, with a status column to match and the same group-moving automations as the to-do list. Use a timeline instead of a date, as projects run for weeks or months.

Add columns for whatever you track per project, such as project type, revenue, cost and profitability, a files column for the project folder, and a point of contact and their email. The tasks board is set up like the to-do list, with To Do, Doing and Done groups and a due date set as a deadline.

1. On the projects board, press the plus button, search for Connect boards and choose the tasks board. Make sure you select Set as a two-way connection, then press Connect boards.
2. On the tasks board, rename the new column to Project, singular, as a task only ever belongs to one project while a project has many tasks.
3. Add a mirror column, connect it to the Connect boards column and choose what to show. Mirroring task status onto the projects board shows how each project is progressing, and mirroring the files column onto the tasks board puts the project folder on every task.
4. Back on the projects board, go to Automate, Manage, then Create automation, and choose when an item is created.
5. Add the action Create item in board and connect boards. Create the item on the tasks board, with Tasks as the source connected boards column and Project as the target.
6. Name the task and fill in its defaults, such as task type, description and who's responsible, then add another action for each other task a new project needs.

That automation acts as the template in this setup. Add a condition, such as only if the project type is Website, and each project type gets its own tasks. When we created a test project, its two tasks appeared on the tasks board, already connected.

A common worry is that the tasks board fills up with thousands of tasks. Filters deal with that: filter by project, person and a due date of this week, and thousands of tasks can come down to a handful. Save each filter as a view, and there's no limit on views.

How Do Portfolios & Projects Work In monday.com?

Each project gets its own boards, and every project rolls up into a portfolio, where it appears almost like an item on a board. That roll-up is what one board per project can't easily do. It's only available on the Enterprise plan of monday.com work management.

At the time of recording, Enterprise wasn't much more expensive than Professional, but it's paid for a year up front, more like a contract than a monthly plan you can cancel at any time. When we last asked monday.com, we were told the minimum was five users, though that may have changed.

1. On Enterprise, press the plus button, choose Project management and create a portfolio first.
2. Add a project with Create new project, choose Standard project (the other option is Multi-level subtasks project) and press Continue.
3. Choose whether to include a resource planner, for allocating resources to stages of the project, then press Create project.

Each project creates two boards: a project board much like the one in setup 2, and a resource board, where you add an assignee or a placeholder and book in the days they'll spend on the project. You can add columns as normal, and the automations are the same as in setup 2.

On the portfolio, some columns belong to the portfolio itself, such as project health, stage, priority and planned timeline, while project progress and the actual timeline are mirrored up from each project. Every new project you add rolls up the same way.

Which monday.com Project Management Setup Should You Use?

Without Enterprise, we recommend the high level, low level setup: a projects board linked to a tasks board. With Enterprise, portfolios and projects make sense some of the time, but we still often lean towards the two-board setup.

One board per project gets messy quickly, especially with a high volume of projects, because the information can't easily be rolled up. The team has to go from board to board without seeing everything in one place, and projects often get forgotten.

A to-do list board is hard to get wrong, but don't expect it to run large, complex projects. It gets overwhelmed very quickly.