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The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
The People Gardener Podcast with Rhonda Delaney
Transform Your Projects with Monday.com's Innovations
Unlock the secrets to seamless international project management as we welcome back Jean Foster, the dynamic Director of Account Support Services. Jean's team, spread across El Salvador, Argentina, India, and Romania, has turned Monday.com into their project management powerhouse. Discover how this tool's intuitive interface, powerful automations, and cost-effectiveness have transformed complex IT infrastructure projects into efficient, collaborative ventures. Jean also shares invaluable insights into managing project milestones and automating crucial contract renewal reminders, proving Monday.com to be a game-changer for global operations.
Ever wondered how to maximize your team's efficiency and streamline workflows? We'll show you how Monday.com can be your ultimate ally. Drawing from my expertise in the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), we explore how automations can handle meetings, to-dos, and one-on-ones with ease. We also delve into the importance of a diligent team and the platform's accessibility for the not-so-tech-savvy. Plus, we offer practical advice for small business owners on finding and sticking with a system that works for them, complete with training resources like YouTube and Udemy to overcome any learning curves. Tune in for actionable steps to boost your leadership and project management prowess!
Well, hey there, welcome to the People Gardener podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm Rhonda Delaney, your host, also known as the People Gardener, thrilled to put this podcast together to help small business owners, new business owners, frustrated business owners and aspiring leaders, whether they're inside business or outside. Each week, we bring you some actionable steps so that you can actually improve your skill as a leader. That's what we're about. We're here to help you become a better leader by giving you access to lots of different perspectives. By giving you access to lots of different perspectives. The guests are varied. We're thrilled to have them.
Speaker 1:Get out your pen, get out your paper and be ready to learn Every single episode. You're going to be able to take something away that you can implement. Are you ready? Let's get to work. Well, hey there. Welcome to the People Gardener podcast. Happy to have you here this week, excited to have a returning guest, jean Foster, and I reached out to her because I knew she was a mondaycom fanatic, absolutely loved it, and her team of people that she works with it's all over the world, so I figured you know what. This woman knows how to use this and get the most out of it, so I thought she'd be great to have on. So welcome, jean, happy to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Rhonda. Super happy to be here and great to have an opportunity to connect again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wonderful how many different countries actually participate in the mondaycom boards.
Speaker 2:Ah gosh, I'd have to count them on my fingers. I would say probably between five and eight countries at any one time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you have a large team down in Latin America.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have in Central America. We America, el Salvador. We have a team in Argentina and South America. Our company also has teams in India and Romania and throughout Europe, as well as the US and Canada, so we've got people all over the place and then in basically every state across the US.
Speaker 1:So let's start. Why do you love mondaycom? What is it that you really like? People should actually know what is your function, what is your position with the?
Speaker 2:company. So I'm currently the director of account support services. I came into this organization in January of last year when the company that I worked for was acquired by my current company and I won't be like naming my current company or anything, because I you know. But what I want to start with is that when we very first started using mondaycom at my previous company, which was Stratacor, based out of Seattle, we did an exhaustive review of multiple project management systems, you know, including all the big names, like you know, all the ones you all know, which I don't want to, you know, bash any particular system.
Speaker 2:But what I'll say is the reason we chose Monday. Well, there were multiples, but it did the most of what we wanted it to do for the most cost-effective. I mean, it was just really cost-effective compared to some of the other bigger names and they had a really rapid development cycle and strong support for their development. And it has a fantastic user interface. I would say you could kind of classify it as spreadsheets on steroids, but it has a wonderful user interface that is extremely intuitive, that allows you to use automations to complete tasks, you know sort of the if-then type of statements that are extremely helpful and really streamline what my team is doing, and so we have a CRM, we have an order management system, but the projects that we're working on often have so many milestones that really can't be effectively managed in a CRM or an order management system. The CRM is really to track your conversations with the client, right, and an order management system tracks the key milestones that need to be passed along to other parts of the business and all the way through to the revenue side. But there are so many steps in between those things. Most of the time, especially on large projects, especially when you're working on projects that span continents and you're working with, you know, multiple different vendors and all of those things there's just so many more milestones than you can feasibly capture in an order management or a CRM.
Speaker 2:And so Monday is super flexible. We can build Monday boards out to capture the milestones required in specific projects. We can collaborate with our clients can collaborate with our clients so we can add our clients in for a read only or give them the ability to write to certain aspects of a project. So it's a huge element of what we use Monday for is when we need to have ongoing, real-time client collaboration. We can do that we can give clients visibility only to certain parts of a project, so that we can keep our internal milestones to ourselves but then provide them a way to see updates in real time without contacting us that allows them to log in and do that. So I think from that standpoint really, that collaboration whether it's internal collaboration or external collaboration with our clients we've added vendors in as well on large projects.
Speaker 2:So what we're doing primarily is IT infrastructure and we might be doing migrations of a client's entire network that supports their global business structure, from one set of products and network elements over to new technology. We there, you know, there's just a variety of things that we would be doing, using Monday to track the minutia and then, for our, from our standpoint also, we use it to make sure we're capturing when something has installed or completed and then when there might be a contract renewal coming up, and we have automations that write from the project board to a reminder board that says hey, this was a three-year contract, we need to check with them, you know six months out, or those types of things. So we have it. When you market installed or completed, it automatically writes to this reminder that says you know, you need to check on the contract here and make sure that they're completed. It automatically writes to this reminder that says you know you need to check on the contract here and make sure that they're still getting the best pricing and the best deal.
Speaker 1:Are you having to figure out what you want on each of the boards? Have you created templates that?
Speaker 2:we have templates.
Speaker 1:So templates are something that you can build yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can build templates yourself. They have templates Monday does. They have templates for different types of projects, whether it's marketing or financial, or implementation of software or whatever. They have various templates. We've then taken those and created our own. And we also use templates for we use pre-sales and post-sales. So we're managing the pre-sales cycle with all of the quoting and pricing and proposal creation and total cost of ownership all of those elements on a pre-sales project board. And then we have the post-sales project board that tracks it from the time the contract is signed all the way through the full implementation of all the sites. But we have templates for those with our key milestones that we have to have in common, right, Because then those translate to key milestones in our other systems. One thing that I will say is that Monday's architecture is a flat architecture.
Speaker 2:Right, because then those translate to key milestones in our other systems, right? One thing that I will say is that that monday's architecture is a flat architecture, so it's not designed for like order management with any kind of hierarchy of, you know, main business and sub businesses and other relationships. It's really just to manage the project. So I would never recommend it as a CRM or anything that requires relationships between hierarchy and client relationships and that also makes it a challenge to integrate fully with other systems. So that's why it's really important that we know our key milestones, so that we're eliminating as much duplicate work as possible, and then also know what goes in between. Right, so it's. Yeah, it's all the little tiny steps in between that we want to make sure are happening on a timely basis so that we can push a project and propel it forward. But, yeah, so that's. We use their templates, we make our own and have those available to the team.
Speaker 1:How do you determine who creates the board, the initial board?
Speaker 2:Our boards could be internal project boards or external client-facing project boards. If it's an external client facing project board, the person creating that is the person who's managing that project. So it's the project manager that will create the board. The manager of the team will oversee and make sure you know they check on all the boards for their team from a quality assurance standpoint to make sure they're hitting all the key milestones, to make sure they're not missing anything and that they have the appropriate data in the board. For internal projects, it's whoever is running that project right. And then you have the ability to add different user types, whether they can just be read only. They can be external or internal. They can have edit capabilities. They can have the ability to create automations or not. So you can make them, you know, give them full edit capability or restrict it more than that.
Speaker 1:So in your position, do you have sight into all of the boards that are related to the area?
Speaker 2:I have sight into most of them. I mean, people can have their own project board, they can create a board, but I'm added in to almost all of them and there is hierarchy. From that standpoint, like I could, you can set it up so that you can view all of the activity happening in your organization what size was the organization when you were doing all of your research into?
Speaker 1:okay, what are we going to do? Which one fits us best? How many people were in that organization? Had about?
Speaker 2:about 40 people company-wide. I think I had maybe 25 of those were in my group and then now my group is about 40 people in my group and our organization within the company is around 250 people. Many, many parts of our organization in the broader company also use mondaycom. So that was actually an interesting piece is that when we are acquired they already had Monday in minimal use for, you know, specific high level corporate projects, but we we brought over our practice for using it in the client facing situations.
Speaker 1:I mean in your research that you did and I know this was a few years ago is there a minimum number of people that you would think you would need in order for a board like that to be more effective than actually just standing up and talking to somebody? You?
Speaker 2:know I use Monday to manage my personal stuff, so I don't think it matters. Like I think Monday is such a great tool I use it to I'm not just part of collaborative boards, I'm on right to my own personal board using automations so that I can keep track of the updates on everything and just have a high level view of all the boards I'm on and any tasks I have. I don't think it matters. I think you could have five people. I think you could have just yourself, although from a cost perspective I'm not sure what that would look like. Like I think you can probably just buy a one person mondaycom license and and use it to manage whatever you're using it for.
Speaker 1:You just mentioned using an automation to bring something that you're responsible for so that it updates on your board If there's any changes to that particular thing.
Speaker 2:Basically there's multiple. You can have multiple boards, project boards. They can have groups within those project boards. You can have all the different columns of your project board and you can write an automation that moves something from one group to another on a sync board. Or you can write an automation that says if this thing happens, if the status goes to this, I want to copy this onto this destination, which would be another board.
Speaker 1:Basically, what doing is? You're setting up in advance to be triggered when there is possible action you may need to take in order to do your tasks. Yep, yeah.
Speaker 2:So if it's in a single board, we used the entrepreneurial operating system and in my previous companies at Stratacor, and we had our Monday board set up to capture all of the EOS elements right, so we would have our agenda for our meetings. We ran all of our meetings out of Monday using the EOS format and you would put on issues to discuss and if you marked it solved, the automation would move it to your solved issues list on that one.
Speaker 2:If you created a to-do in your to-do section and you marked it to done, you know, using the EOS terminology it would move to your to-done tasks. And then I also used it for managing my one-on-ones and we had an automation that said, if you mark an issue as I can't remember the exact status an issue, as I can't remember the exact status but if you marked an issue for review, it would write it to a board for our HR to view and it would put it with a status flag so that when it came to review time, you could just sort by the categories in your completed issues and have your little note of everything that you wanted to make sure you didn't forget about when it came time to review. Very cool.
Speaker 1:Are most people diligent about dealing with the status, like completing it or moving it, Like is that? Is that a bit of a challenge if people aren't addressing that component of it?
Speaker 2:We look for people who are really a certain profile of you know. They're project management people and so they really want to see things move forward. And we have regular meetings with our sales team to go through where every project we're working on with our sales team, to go through where every project we're working on, what the status is, and we update those boards before the meeting. That's our, that's our commitment to our business partners that we'll have the project boards updated before we have the meeting with them so that you know we can all we then we only have to call out the things that are at risk and they could just read through it and it takes less time for the meeting.
Speaker 1:Wow, it sounds like it does a lot.
Speaker 2:It does has really helped our team stay on top of all of the smaller elements of the projects we work and make sure that we keep our communication going with both our internal and our external clients.
Speaker 1:Somebody that's never used it before that comes on board with you. What kind of a learning curve for them till they're at a place where they feel comfortable.
Speaker 2:You know, I think it's a really intuitive system. I'm not the most techie like app techie person. I can talk infrastructure underlying infrastructure with you, but from a techie, app techie type of person, that's not me. And I do fine with Monday. I mean I can build my own automations and build my own boards and do all of those things. So we really just we do some basic training with the team. We have some YouTube videos that are available to learn how to do Monday. We also use an internal training platform called Udemy that has some training available there and then we just work with team members to go side by side and do on the job with other members of the team. It is really one of the more intuitive elements of what we do for people to catch on to. It's by far one of the easier systems and tools that we provide to our team.
Speaker 1:Is this an app that they have open on their computer all the time, like when they're at work?
Speaker 2:Oh, I would say so for the most part. Yeah, we're using it day in and day out to manage milestones and so it's kind of you end up living in there a lot and certainly for almost any meeting we're on, we're, you know, reporting out on progress from the milestones that are there.
Speaker 1:Any last encouraging words to small business owners, who are completely discombobulated and unorganized with regards to Monday, might be something that they should look at eyes with regards to Monday might be something that they should look at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would just say find a system and tools that work for you, but use them, and Monday's a great place to start because it's so, it's intuitive, it's easy to look at and it can be used for collaboration with clients as well as internal teams, and so it has a lot of things that you can do. I would say we've probably pushed it to its limits, as far as beyond what it was initially built for. We've used it really, really heavily, and you just have to start and start playing around with it. But for me I don't know about anyone else, but I can't remember all the things I need to get done in my head anymore. I just can't track all the things right. And so Monday has such excellent task and milestone management. I use it just for the things I commit to in meetings. I put them in my own personal Monday board and make sure that I'm not losing track of what I've said I would do, and that helps me professionally to make sure I'm not missing what I've committed to personally.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much for sharing.
Speaker 2:It's been an incredible tool for us, and our clients love it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Okay, folks, that's it for this week. We'll talk to you again next week. Well, thanks for joining me today. Just a quick reminder if you were not on my email list, go to my website, rondadelaneycom, and there's a place there that you can subscribe, keep you up to date on all things people, gardening and leadership and also a reminder that the Raving Fans Society app is available on the Apple Store and the Google Store. I do have a free membership in there that you'll be able to access some of my material, and then there's also a paid membership, and right now it's $49 a month and you will receive access to all of my material, all of the teaching content, including a resource library that will really help you along, as well as group coaching every month and then quarterly bringing in guests that will talk on topics that pertain to small business owners and leadership. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you again next week.