We think monday.com is the best work management platform around.
Are we biased? Maybe.
But that doesn’t mean we’re wrong.
Although monday.com is super intuitive and user friendly — with dazzling features, customizable templates, dozens of integrations (tell us when to stop) — it’s still worthwhile to know exactly how you can get the most out of the platform.
That’s why we at monday.com have put together this step-by-step tutorial to setting up the platform, customizing templates, and collaborating with your team.
You’ll be a monday.com project management whizz in no time!
Getting started with monday.com
Getting started with monday.com is super simple. Follow these key steps and you’ll be set up in minutes.
How do I set up a new monday.com board?
Once you’ve created an account, you’ll probably be pretty keen to get organized!
We recommend you start by putting together your first monday.com board. With 200+ customizable templates, it’s easy to find something that matches your business’s needs.
For instance, if you lead your company’s marketing team, you may want to use our editorial calendar and client management templates.
Managing growth projects, sales teams, budgets, HR or a dev sprint?
Try the high level project plan template, the sales process template, the budget tracker template, the employee onboarding template, or the sprint planning template.
Or just check them all out in the template library…
Which view should I choose?
Depending on your business and project requirements, you may have a preferred way of displaying your timetables, Workflows, and processes.
Some users like to work with calendar formats, so they can plan out their team’s monthly workload, whereas others might prefer a brightly colored Kanban board that maps out each section of the project.
- Kanban is great for helping teams collaborate by displaying all project-related Workflows and sprints. Intuitive color-coding makes it easy to see at what stage of the project each task is at.
- Calendar view is effective for planning out your team’s monthly, quarterly, or yearly workload.
- Gantt view is best for mapping out project deadlines and checking in on task timelines in the form of a Gantt chart.
- Chart helps you review all your project-related events and tasks.
- Timeline is effective for giving you a full overview of who is working on which projects when.
How do I organize my team?
Let’s get your team(s) into and up and running in your shiny new board.
Adding teammates
When it comes to successful project management, open communication and team collaboration are key.First, you’ll need to click on your profile picture and select teams. Here, you can see all the existing team members on your account and add new team members.
Once you’ve selected team members and named your team, we recommend choosing a team photo, which will make it much easier to identify who’s working on what.
When you have teams in place, you can simply add whole teams to boards instead of having to add users individually.
It’s also easy to remove team members.
Check out our full guide to creating teams and adding members here.
Including statuses and dates
Hitting deadlines and keeping track of all the different moving parts is a fundamental part of effective project management.
Adding a start date and a finish time helps map out your project’s overall timeline. You can include dates by adding a date column.
Equally, a status column can give you a quick indication of how each task is going. Once you’ve added a status column, users can update whether a task is in progress, complete, or if they’re stuck.
Using automations
Do you feel like you’re doing the same repetitive work over and over again?
Manual work can be a huge drag on your team’s overall productivity and set your project back.
monday.com Automations help relieve some of this tedious work. The best part is that the platform handles the technical side and you don’t need to do any coding.
Automations allow you to set any event to trigger an action. For instance, when a team member completes a task, you could set it to trigger a notification to the team leader.
Try watching our recorded automations webinar for full details of how to set them up.
Build your monday.com dashboard
Once you’ve got your monday.com boards and team in place, it’s time to set up your dashboards.
monday.com dashboards provide you with a clear overview of your current projects and boards.
You can customize dashboards by adding different widgets:
- Battery: the battery widget enables you to track your boards’ overall progress in a single place. You can combine several boards in a battery icon so you can see all of your tasks’ progress at a glance.
- Calendar: retrieve all date-related information from your boards and put them together with the calendar widget.
- Chart: take a look at the data side of your projects and pull key information like responses to polls you may be running on your boards — for instance, employee satisfaction.
- Resource management: allocate resources and distribute work correctly by managing resources with this widget.
- Tasks across board: take a look at an overview of all of the tasks on multiple boards.
- Time tracking: see how much time is spent on different tasks, either from an individual or team perspective. This helps you monitor the spread of work and makes it easy to manage hourly billing. If you had previously used a Google Sheet or similar for the task, you’ll love how much easier the widget makes task management.
These widgets are just the beginning of how you can customize your dashboards. Take a look at our guide to dashboards here.
More monday.com resources
After reading this tutorial, you’ll hopefully have a solid foundation of the basics of monday.com as a Work OS.
To take your skills beyond the basics, check out this list of additional resources:
- monday.com guides: our guides provide details on specific industry-related uses and the technicalities of monday.com.
- Webinars: Try our regular live or recorded webinars to get you started.
- Video tutorials: a monday.com video tutorial can give you technical guidance on things like Excel importing and exporting as well as uploading files.
- Use cases: whether you lead an engineering team or run a photography studio, reviewing our use cases can show you how to best implement monday.com.
- Podcasts: Check our startup for startup podcast for business tips and insight into what’s behind monday.com’s product methodology.
- Community forum: Ask questions in our community forum and receive responses from a monday.com team member or another user. You can also browse past question threads.
- Customer support: our customer support team is always there for those times when you need some extra guidance or to report a bug issue.
Conclusion
monday.com’s highly customizable templates and dashboards have the power to transform the way your business works.
While many other services out there might describe themselves as project management tools, monday.com is a complete Work OS — a workspace that allows you to do so much more than assign a task to your graphic designer Josh.
From choosing multiple views to building your dashboard and collaborating with teammates, there’s no limit to what you can create (and then manage) with monday.com.
If you’re keen to get started, give the monday.com platform a go and put all of these tips into practice.
