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My wife and I own a business, I help out as and when around my normal full time job. My wife works there 3 days per week plus lots of out of hours work. We have an Operations Director and a Business Manager there full time, plus 20 or so other staff. We have lots of day to day operational stuff on the go, plus quite a bit of business change. Given we are rarely all in the same building, or even Teams meeting at the same time, I'm looking at whether something like monday.com will help with project and task management and tracking.
Simple spec:
Needs to allow task allocation to individual or groups of people, tracking, escalation, some tasks to be private to select people, grouping of tasks into projects, dashboard of overall status, chat type functionality within tasks, integration with Windows calendars would be nice but not essential. I need setup and user interface to be intuitive / easy. Likely to be only 4 users.
Any real life experience to share? Thanks.
Theres two sorts of these things around. Simple ones, where you have to adopt the tool *and* the workflow that the tool wants you to use. Complex ones, where you can have any workflow you like, but you'll probably have to spend a lot of time setting it up and then policing its usage.
Sounds like you'd rather something simple so try a few and pick the one that has the workflow you like
Any real life experience to share? Thanks.
Yes - every single one of these third-party productivity tools promises the world and then turns out to be a monumental pain in the arse which doesn't do *quite* what you want and which at least one staff member will refuse to use (or be completely incompetent at) and you end up spending more time policing the use of the product than looking at whatever outputs it's supposed to be generating.
This applies double if there's any aspect of finance management built into it.
I would say that your first port of call should be Teams as you already have Microsoft. Teams has all sorts of inbuilt apps like Planner, Engage, Shifts (kind of a calendar management/scheduling tool) etc and it's already integrated and included so you don't need anything else scraping around your existing calendars.
Some of it comes down to ways of working too. If staff are taking shortcuts or not uploading to OneDrive or not booking holiday via a formal system, stuff will slip through no matter how many tools you have in place.
As long as you don’t have any complex budgeting or resource management then the built in MS planner you already have will probably do what you need.
However, as the proposed replacement for full fat Project it’s woeful.
We use it work for parts of our activity - I'm not directly involved but have attended discussions on it. We use mainly for task management type stuff, all our big projects go through POL but that is a bit of a pain for faster moving stuff and in any case POL is being retired soon.
It came to us with a new Delivery Manager in our CI team, they'd used it previously and got approval to trial it which is why I was in some of the discussions about it. We use for our measurement / calibration type services, typically a short job of a few hours or days to eg: measure something specific, or calibrate something (cf a long project to design and build a new atomic clock....)
So a typical use case would be a work schedule which involves people (with the right training and validation to do a traceable calibration) and a piece of equipment (often shared across services) - so we schedule up and then the thing to calibrate gets held up in customs, or we haven't received the order from the customer, or..... and so we can't do it, but now what can go in that gap and where can we slot in after. The sort of stuff Kanban boards are used for, but on this it'll automatically rejig the schedules across multiple people, kit, jobs, etc., and optimise the schedule again for you.
Why Monday.com - mainly because the person who suggested it has used before, but I'm sure there are various others.
....Given we are rarely all in the same building, or even Teams meeting at the same time, I'm looking at whether something like monday.com will help with project and task management and tracking.
It sounds like your already in the Microsoft Ecosystem. All the things you mention are already available from Microsoft, the chances are your paying for them and not using them The 'Planner' app is really good as a starter, once you learn how to use it.
First foray into Monday.com in the last 2 days, it's slow as hell in Chrome and lazy loads everything so seems to flicker lots (perhaps that a problem with dark-reader). I don't like it much, but I have become indoctrinated by Jira and it's ways (I'm also a Jira admin by default now, so I can bend the workflow to my will).
