Using a combination of a high-level board and several low-level boards is a super popular workflow that can help you get started managing your projects with monday.com. Creating a high-level/low-level workflow can benefit your company by giving all team members a better understanding of your overall aims and objectives. 

 

The highs and the lows, let's jump right in! 🏊‍♂️

 

Create Low-Level boards

A low-level board is a great tool to manage all of the important details of your tasks/projects! Unlike a high-level board, which is intended to provide a project overview, low-level boards help to zoom into the finer details of anything that you are looking to manage.

• Creating groups on your board

The first step to designing our new super-efficient workflow is to organize the groups on our board. There are unlimited ways to group our items. For example, we can group our board by project phase, department, clients, campaigns, or accounts - depending on the workflow we are managing!

 

• Choosing columns for your board

Columns provide you with the data that you need to see for each item on your board, and they can each be used in a variety of different ways. Browse through the Column Center to preview all of the options, and see which ones can work best for you.

 

• Subscribe your team members

Finally, let's get our team members subscribed to our board so that they'll always be in the loop. We can see who's subscribed to our board by clicking the "Invite" button at the top right corner of our board.

 

Create a High-Level board

A high-level board allows you to see an overview of everything you and your team are working on across multiple different boards, by connecting multiple boards and workflows into one. High-level boards can be organized by quarters, months, phases, clients, projects or any other way that works for the team. Put simply, a high-level board is your first step towards developing a streamlined workflow.

 

Let's review how we chose to organize our below high-level board. Keep in mind, this is just an example and you can customize the structure of your board to suit your own unique needs.

• Groups: We've organized our groups according to each phase of our project. 

• Items: The items on our board represent each project being worked on.

• Columns: The columns on our board allow us to have all important data-points recorded in one place. These are a few column types that we find essential here:

• People Column to provide ownership to one project manager who is overseeing the associated project.  

• Timeline Column to track a timeframe for each project. We’ll see how this column comes to life via the Gantt View later in this guide!

• Status Column to display the department that each project belongs to. Keep in mind, these labels can be customized to show anything that you wish.

 

Connect your High-Level and Low-Level boards

One of the most useful aspects of a high-level board is that it can be linked and synced to low-level boards so that information can instantly flow from one board to another. While high-level boards focus on the overall picture, low-level boards are useful for having visibility into certain core details and specific aspects of a larger process.

 

The following are a few ways that you can connect your low-level and high-level boards to make sure that all relevant information is updated at all times:

• The Connect Boards and Mirror Column

The Connect Boards Column and the Mirror Column work together to connect and reflect information from one or more boards to the current one. When you mirror information from one board to another, you can edit the mirrored information and these changes will be automatically reflected in both boards.

For our "Tea Imports Project Portfolio", we wanted to easily link and reflect information from four separate low-level boards that relate to this project. To do this, we first connected the relevant boards from the Connect Boards Column:

 

After your boards have been selected, you will be prompted to create a Mirror Column. From within the mirror column you can select which column to display from your Low-Level boards. This column will be synced and any changes made here will reflect on your Low-Level board, and vice versa.

 

 

Each item on your High-Level board can then be synced to items from one of your Low-Level boards. In the example below we have synced the first item on our High-Level board to four items from its corresponding Low-Level board; "Green Tea Imports". Our Mirror Column is then displaying the status of each item from that Low-Level board.

 

• The Link Column

Alternatively, you can also choose to simply add hyperlinks to any related boards by using the Link Column. This column type allows you to connect low-level boards to any related item by giving you a dedicated space to input the unique URL of those boards. Using this column makes jumping between boards seamless. 

 

• The Tags Column

The Tags Column provides a way to organize groups of items across different boards. You can use tags to track category, department, quarters, etc. By tagging and using Search Everything, you can draw connections between all of your boards across the entire account.

 

Automate your workflow

Automations are simple, customizable automatic processes that you can create in just a few seconds. They can be push notifications of specific updates or automatic actions that are taken once an action item is complete.

Here are some useful automations to boost your high-level board: 

• "When an item is created, create item in board, and connect boards with column"

This automation can be used to sync your low-level and high-level boards, effortlessly. When an item is created on a low level board, the automation will create that item on your high-level board, and sync the boards with a chosen column.

 

• "When date arrives, and only if status is something, notify someone"

This automation allows the project manager to be notified whenever a due date has passed and the item is not complete.

 

 

 

 

If you have any questions, please reach out to our team right here. We’re available 24/7 and happy to help.