Is monday.com the Best Project Management Tool?

Managing a project used to involve a small team physically gathered in a single place. And a project manager or supervisor carefully guides the team, typically using the best project management tool they can find.

We now have a new way of managing and running projects—which involves easy collaboration with outside consultants and remote workers. This creates its own particular challenges.

Addressing these possible pain points are better controlled using a reliable project management tool like monday.com. Is it the best PM tool in the market today? Let’s find out by subjecting its features and capabilities to the recurring 7 pain points of project management.

It’s always exciting to start a major project. Everything seems perfect—the newly-approved proposal, a comprehensive to-do list, realistic plans and schedules, and an enthusiastic team.

Issues appear the moment a project commences. Expenses exceed the budget. Team members pile-up mistakes. Everything is in a mess.

Project failure is common. A study of PM professionals reports the three largest PM challenges as having poorly trained project managers, trying to operate too many projects and the lack of funding.

In the U.S. alone, poor project performance costs around $122 million of every $1 billion spent.

That’s why having a good project management solution is very crucial to businesses nowadays. PM tools help keep everything in a single convenient location, contained, and, correctly integrated.

With over 80,000 business clients from more than 200 vertical markets, monday.com is an acknowledged leader in project management.

What’s more, a prestigious research organization affirms that it excels at work management, providing highly flexible planning and tracking capabilities.

How does monday.com fare in solving constantly emerging problems in managing projects? You get answers to these questions with a test run. Just sign up for monday.com free trial here and see the software in action for yourself.

Why monday.com Is the Best PM Tool?

1. It’s excellent at planning & organization

Managing a project is a very challenging endeavor. A project manager must attend to numerous things at any given time. A specific set of skills to solve problems and get things done are required to address each project activity. These problems that generally emerge across projects are called the 7 Pain Points of Project Management.

There’s really no workaround against these 7 pain points. The only way to solve them is by directly dealing with them. Mastery over these 7 pain points enables managers to enhance their management practices and help create a functional management approach. And to help managers more efficiently deal with these pain points, there are robust PM platforms like monday.com. We’ve subjected this leading PM tool to each of these PM pain points and present the results below.

Organizing is hands-down the most time-consuming part of a manager’s work life. It is central to the purpose of project management. Essential to getting things done include planning, delegating and keeping track of delegated tasks.

The organization of a successful project is usually the most challenging area of any project. However, only 58% of organizations truly grasp the importance of project management. Actually, having high project management skills is one of the best strategic competencies nowadays. Aside from more efficient problem solving, project management mastery is key in driving change in any organizational setting.

Solution

Efficiency in completing the planning and organizing aspects is crucial in getting the ball rolling in any project. Business tools like ERP and collaboration platforms will provide much-needed help in making everything organized.

monday.com dashboard showing high-level overview.

monday.com eliminates the need for the continuous supervision of team leaders and supervisors. Every team member must “own” his/her task. This is done by properly configuring the high-level project boards. 

Each high-level board should have status columns that display the major milestones per project. To get a quick update of all project statuses, a single click does the job. You can use person columns to assign tasks to team members. This helps every member become more responsible and accountable.

A properly-made monday.com board will ensure that project managers and stakeholders are always on top of things. It helps managers make better plans and organize tasks and deadlines more efficiently. Managers can use the Tags or Link columns to connect two types of boards for smooth shifting between them.

2. It promotes accountability

Holding oneself accountable for a problem is never easy. Still, accountability ensures that anyone who had been assigned to complete a task had taken on the responsibility of doing it whatever it takes. 

Accountability is about being true on a commitment. It’s the responsibility to a project result, not just a set of tasks.  This can be the hardest aspect of project management for people to deal with. No-one likes to feel responsible for things which can go wrong on a project.

Managers should properly distribute allocate accountability to their team members as clearly as possible. They should ensure that there’s no misunderstanding to achieve transparency in who’s accountable. When handling remote team members, it’s best to deploy efficient PM tools to better manage virtual teams.

Solution

The project manager is the one accountable for the successful completion of any project.

On the task or stage level, the team leader should be made accountable. This will ensure that all involved parties know all expectations and their roles to play.

Comparison between accountability and responsibility using RACI Matrix from SmartSheet.

monday.com helps in organizing every project aspect and it can facilitate smooth allocation of accountability. For instance, using the Team column (from the Column Center) to assign tasks/projects to team members will make him/her accountable for their performance.

Motivated people usually finish their assignments on time and give their best. Likewise, managers can measure member performance using the main boards. Every team member, moreover, will know the persons to talk to, who should be held accountable, and who to congratulate.

Status visibility helps to prevent misunderstandings and office politics. Openness and transparency will make your team more motivated to perform better. 

3. It is handy for estimation & consolidation

Estimating every project detail and consolidate everything to make the project whole often result in problems. In fact, budgets are the common causes of most conflicts in numerous projects worldwide. Aside from this, many things do get overlooked.

Estimates must correctly predict the time and resources required to finish project components. Making accurate estimates help in determining the project’s ROI and total profitability. Managers must understand the value of data in projects and how this will affect upcoming ones.

Solution

Efficient estimation begins from larger items into smaller details. After ascertaining all these, the manager can make the project estimates and consolidation.

monday.com showing a Search/Filter dashboard.

With its robust filter feature, monday.com can help you more efficiently create estimates and monitor each aspect at any point. You can easily filter your boards based on a team member or team per task or project assignment. This provides you a fast and easy way to check how you have spread out your workload between your team and the status of the tasks each of your team members are working on.

You can also utilize multiple filters across your boards to sieve into tasks that require added attention (or resources). By using these robust filtering capabilities, you can easily measure your team’s productivity or poor performance. Instead of relying on outdated spreadsheets, these added efficiencies are among the reasons why PM solutions are useful to teams.

4. It facilitates easy follow-up

Yes, follow-ups are only supporting to other tasks like organizing and estimation. Many consider follow-ups as cumbersome and dull. It is important for every manager to know about how things are doing.

Managers must know of every member’s progress daily. They must function in a way that makes follow-up activities a joy to reckon with. It will help keep things in check for the long term. This also among the vital things to look for in a PM tool, especially if the tool can allow managers to both save time and effectively track employees.

Solution

For monday.com, the best way to make follow-ups is by implementing an efficient communication system involving the whole team. You must ensure that you’re communicating with the right people all the time. You can do so by creating teams on your monday.com account.

If you’re managing multiple teams, you only need to type @mention the team to communicate with the team altogether. This way, you don’t need to type every team member’s name. This makes general announcements quick and simple. You can use this feature to include the complete team assigned to a task by subscribing everyone to the item. This way, no single team member can miss updates uploaded on the board.

5. It provides powerful evaluation

Providing solid, clear feedback is another important role of project managers. It’s true that every manager has the power to give an evaluation that he/she deems correct. Making baseless evaluation is not only a waste, and can even create problems.

An efficient staff with a poor evaluation will demotivate him or her. In the same manner, a poor-performing staff with a high evaluation will send wrong signals.

An evaluation must be based on factual evidence.

Solution

Providing unbiased, factual feedback is an integral part of any successful project. Project managers must never use member evaluation to get back on team members.

Team member evaluation should observe objectivity. To make it effective, it must be evidence-based

A monday.com dashboard, indicating estimated work schedules and task statuses to support efficient evaluation.

monday.com offers one of the best staff evaluation feature. For this intuitive PM platform, crucial to any successful project evaluation is conducting reviews with the entire team. This approach removes being subjected to managerial bias since everyone will have a say on their colleagues’ performance.

An entire team could sit together in front of their task board to cap a completed workweek. If everyone did great for the past week, every member can turn completed tasks (in Done) to green. This will definitely make every team member feel great about what the group had attained together.

This is an awesome way to inspire your team and generate rapport. It can also transform going to work in the coming weeks less taxing knowing the overall status of tasks. No wonder monday.com is considered one of the best online PM tools for your projects by thousands of users worldwide.

6. It enables visibility

The first step to any successful project is visibility, and visibility rests mainly on the adequacy and access to information. There will be instances that information may not be readily available to every team member. Healthy transparency among team members is created when everyone is well-informed. This typically results in continuous enhancement in team efficiency.

A project with highly visible components–time, individual tasks, and resources–helps ensure success. The need for a single place to store and access all project information is crucial. This allows better monitoring and communication of task progress. Achieving visibility is one of the top benefits of PM platforms.

Solution

One of the strengths of monday.com is providing complete and timely information. The availability of information is vital in making correct decisions and performing timely actions. 

monday.com’s main boards help in ensuring that everything is transparent and can be accessed by every team member. Aside from the task board, a project manager’s main boards should include the high-level project board. Using monday.com’s high-level project board requires giving everyone access to achieve transparency. This will make your team appreciate how their individual contributions fit into the larger scheme of things.

7. It promotes feedback

Proving feedback is the final pain point. Often problematic, project managers should have the resolve and objectivity to convey negative feedback to poor performing members.

It is an enjoyable experience to offer feedback to high-performing staff or colleagues. The manager must only reinforce their exemplary performance and to boost their motivation to keep up their good work.

Managers should address this final pain point as tactfully as possible. This is to help employees focus on the issues that need improvement. Project leaders should make team members feel the exigency to do better.

Solution

monday.com visual project tracking helps to easily monitor milestones and problem areas.

Every team member needs feedback and recognition. Feedback is key to any project success. It works for sustaining a good performance or improving a poor one. To make your feedback mechanism efficient, you need to have adequate and timely information.

monday.com helps you be on top of things. A smart visual format allows users to easily see and separate milestones from problem areas. As such, giving the needed feedback has never been this easy.

Verdict

Along with other demands of project management, these 7 pain points provide the most pressing of all challenges. As with any human activity, practice makes perfect. Team leaders must continually hone their PM knowledge and skills to succeed. This will ensure that addressing these major pain points become integral to their day-to-day activities.

Project managers should be able to anticipate the problems that may obstruct the progress of any project. This is on top of the need for efficient planning, resource management, and meeting deadlines.

For everything that a project manager does, there’s monday.com. This cost-effective project management tool helps a lot in averting larger issues and ensuring success.

Don’t just take our word for it. You can actually try this very efficient PM tool for free. You can easily sign up for monday.com free trial here.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.