Look up monday.com project management, and you’ll find countless articles comparing it to other platforms like Asana, Trello, and Microsoft Project. This is a fair approach to take, but it is mostly incorrect.
The market for project management software is growing at an incredible pace. According to Gartner, it is expected to surpass the mark of $15 billion globally by 2026. This market growth is being driven by the growing demand for interconnected processes, visibility, and collaboration across departments. However, according to research conducted by McKinsey, less than 30 per cent of organisations using collaborative platforms experience the expected levels of efficiency increases. The biggest cause for failure here is typically poor implementation rather than the platform itself. In other words, most companies are buying a highly advanced tool and using it to perform tasks of moderate complexity.
monday.com is among the best work management platforms on the market. Through our extensive experience with it, we have seen first-hand that companies utilising it as a monday.com project management tool are, more often than not, failing to unlock its full potential.
The Project Management Trap
We observe a pattern here. A group of employees from the Operations, Marketing, or IT departments starts using monday.com to organise their project activities. Boards are made, tasks assigned, deadlines established. And everyone is happy about it until this setup remains unchanged for a couple of years.
This is what is commonly referred to as the project management trap: the platform is introduced to address the problem it needs to address; however, it is never reviewed again to determine whether it can serve other purposes. Not a sign of complacency, rather, a consequence of daily operational pressure, which does not provide much room for strategic considerations. According to the Pulse of the Profession survey conducted by the Project Management Institute, only one out of four organisations spends enough time properly configuring and scaling their work management platforms within the first 18 months after implementation.
As a consequence, a rather standard situation arises in which the gap emerges between purchased capabilities and actual platform use. A recent Forrester study on SaaS utilisation shows that enterprise software solutions’ core capabilities cost millions. For a comprehensive platform like monday.com, it means quite a lot is left unused.
The reason it all happens lies in the nature of the platform itself: once set to project management mode, monday.com performs incredibly well, providing improved efficiency and organisational clarity over what you already had. Yet, such performance should be considered just the tip of the iceberg.
What monday.com Actually is
The standard monday.com offering, aside from monday.com CRM, monday.com Service and monday.com Dev, is ‘Work OS’, a Work Operating System. This is not mere positioning. The product truly offers much more and is much more than merely a project management tool. The product cannot be described as project management software with some automation features tacked on. It can better be considered a highly configurable data management system and workflowA workflow is the backbone of how work actually gets done. Understand what a workflow is, why it is a foundational business concept, and what good workflow design looks like in practice. Read more... engine, with project management being only one of the things it is great at.
To begin with, the product has everything about it geared toward structuring and managing data and workflows. Under the hood, the boards the users engage with are relational database structures. Boards are data structures. Items are data records. Columns are data attributes. Once you realise that, the system acquires a completely different perspective. With that in mind, it becomes clear how the product can perform so many different kinds of business processes, including Customer Relationship Management.
For instance, the product can be configured to run the client onboarding process from the first contact through contract signing. It would allow for moving information around and triggering relevant actions and updates on the go. It could handle everything from setting up the marketing campaign, from brainstorming ideas through to getting assets approved and analysed. The product would easily support HR operations too – hiring pipelines, onboarding checklists and performance reviews. All of that goes way beyond project management.
What separates a monday.com deployment that makes the organisation’s processes operate more smoothly is not its feature set, but rather its architecture.
The Cost of Underutilising a Platform
Indeed, running an efficient platform at half capacity carries commercial costs, which cannot be overlooked. The first one is a straightforward licence cost. It does not make sense to invest in a monday.com licence if all tasks which a 50-person team manages using the software could be managed using a basic project management solution. But this is not the main issue at stake here.
The next major cost associated with under-utilisation of automation is an operational one. Each minute a person spends performing any manual task which could have been performed using monday.com automation capabilities is money lost. According to McKinsey’s studies on automation and knowledge work, approximately 60% of occupations comprise activities which could be automated with today’s technology. For most of such activities within a monday.com setting, it would make perfect sense to turn automation on since it lies comfortably within the platform capabilities – from providing and processing statuses to team handoff processes.
There is also an issue of visibility of operations in cases when an organisation uses only a minimal set of tools provided by the platform. As McKinsey points out in the above article, one of the major benefits that a platform like monday.com provides when properly used is an instantaneous view of organisational operations across departments, which enables leadership teams to make truly timely decisions. In contrast, organisations which use only monday.com project management functions usually lack this ability entirely.
To sum up, an effective workflow designed using monday.com platform capabilities generates more value, including better data for better decisions.
What Strategic Deployment Looks Like
The companies that extract maximum value from monday.com possess a number of common features which are completely independent of their technological prowess. Firstly, they have a good understanding of the processes they would like to optimise, and not just a list of desired features. They think systematically rather than in terms of specific tasks. Moreover, they include the employees whose work needs optimisation in the platform design process.
On a practical level, successful deployment starts with identifying the key workflows which incur costs in terms of lost time or delayed actions. This activity in itself could be described as a form of consultation aimed at identifying key business processes rather than configuring specific software features. The technology component comes second to the process-oriented design.
Next comes architecture-related planning. How should different types of information flow between boards? Where should automation be implemented to cut down on unnecessary manual steps? Which dashboards does senior management need access to, and which decisions should they be enabling through their analysis? These aspects tend to have a considerable effect on performance but are not usually discussed when planning a regular software rollout.
A monday.com implementation project carried out in this way also inevitably reveals opportunities for integration of different systems. The platform integrates easily into a large number of other applications, such as the make.com platform used by our company. The combination of these tools makes it possible to create complex workflows which cannot be achieved simply with the help of monday.com automations.
Typically, we come on board once a company has been using monday.com for a year or two and is trying to figure out why it is not delivering expected results. The answer lies in its deployment being aimed directly at solving immediate problems without paying sufficient attention to the process as a whole.
Why Vision is the Real Limiting Factor
The key feature of monday.com is something rarely explicitly acknowledged: the platform will do precisely what you tell it to do, and nothing else. It does not reorganise itself. It does not identify which processes would be best suited to automation. It does not tell you that the process you have designed for onboarding clients could be modified to reduce the cycle time by three days. You must supply that insight yourself.
That is why, in the end, vision – rather than features, budget, or even technical expertise – is the true constraint on monday.com deployments. Companies that view it as a monday.com project management tool receive project management results. Companies that see it as a business operating system receive operating system results. The difference is not a product limitation. It is a mindset issue.
According to Gallup, leadership engagement is consistently identified as the decisive factor behind the successful implementation of new technology platforms in the workplace. When leaders understand the capabilities of monday.com and are engaged in the design process, implementations tend to be ambitious and yield tangible results. On the other hand, when the responsibility falls solely upon the shoulders of a project manager or an operations manager, they tend to stay focused on the specific problem that motivated the initial adoption of the platform.
It is not a criticism of those individuals. It is a plea to treat platform strategy as a conversation for leaders rather than an information technology decision. Just as the question, “What should our CRMCRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Discover what CRM really means, how businesses use it, and why it sits at the heart of modern customer strategy and operations. Read more... do for us?” is answered at the leadership level, so too should the question, “What should monday.com do for us?”.
monday.com is genuinely capable of being a force multiplier within organisations, connecting data, streamlining processes, and providing leadership with the insights needed to make fast and informed decisions. But only if somebody asks it to.
As Ambitious as the People Deploying it
monday.com project management is a highly legitimate way of leveraging a great tool. However, it is definitely not a groundbreaking one. Those who were able to transform their processes through monday.com were successful because they asked the right questions and implemented solutions based on the answers.
When looking at your team’s current utilisation of monday.com, one needs to ask the question: Are you simply using the platform to track tasks, or is it an actual operating system for your organisation? Does it integrate with your other tools and processes, or does it exist as a separate silo? Do your leaders know immediately what is going on in your operations, or do you still have people compiling reports?
And there is great news: most of what monday.com is capable of, you probably already pay for in the license fee. The investment necessary is not monetary. It is strategic.
If you would like to learn what it takes to make a truly ground-breaking change through monday.com, book a call with a monday.com partner for a free consultation.
