This week I was mainly closing out on some admin and Drupal training that was put on hold due to an outstanding task at work that was finished midweek. While I wait for code review, I have downtime in the workplace to complete our organisation-wide planning/project management training: we have recently adopted Monday.com as a platform to control projects internally and across team disciplines.
Our management noticed in the annual review of performance, that a lot of pain points were observed internally and from feedback from our partners and delegates, was that miscommunication was usually at the heart of our problems. This seems to be reflected by teams working in silos to an extent, with a lack of accountability on team members or the assumption that responsibility purely lies with each team lead. Monday.com attempts to provide transparency by producing these project task boards so that ideally any stakeholder or internal team member associated with the project, can view the current progress. This should spark a discussion as to why there is a performance drop or to hold those responsible accountable for delays.
After going through a short video training course, I come to find that the platform is certainly an effective project management tool but it requires some key aspects for managers to see value:
Requires 'buy-in' from all staff regardless of seniority. If junior staff do not actively update their tasks, or prompt discussions with other colleagues then likely the team members will resort to their old methods of getting things done.
With all the fancy 'bells and whistles' that Monday offers to management teams, one can see the attraction of spending time on making it look attractive and building in automation. But, a tool such as this should be viewed as a means of facilitation: it won't do the work for you. Could that extra time consumed on building a fancy taskboard, be used more effectively on actually working on completing the tasks?
You can't be afraid of criticism. All management tools simply aim to make it transparent to all those involved, who is responsible for what on a project, how much it will cost and how long it will take. You have to assign workers and deadlines to tasks and this means being transparent about what you have taken on. The platform prevents people from hiding from ambiguity and resorting to blame culture when deadlines or budgets are surpassed. Although, accepting criticism can be a tough management decision for junior or new staff.
Team leads should spend time crafting an effective presentation 'dashboard'. This is an overview slide that summarises all the projects that a team are involved with so that management and other teams can quickly see what the team are working on and any blockers. It should also highlight milestone dates especially if tasks are cross-disciplined. This requires team leads to be open to showing off good performance and not hiding their team's low productivity or incompetence/mistakes.
The automation features are great on Monday.com but it takes experience to know what automation is beneficial to a team. It's tempting to implement many shortcuts to reduce manual input but it still requires setup and testing. If this setup time is significant, you would have to ask how much time you would be saving over just manually doing the task in the first instance. Not all team members like the idea of building in automation as there is this fear of job loss or replacement by machines, especially in low-skilled or junior roles.
I'm happy to use a project management tool like Monday, and the interface is not too disimilar from Atlassian's Jira or Trello Boards. I will look to setup a project and taskboard for an upcoming website build project.