Ready to take control of your projects? In this article, we'll show you how to manage every step of your project lifecycle using monday.com—from collecting ideas and approving them to planning, executing, and tracking progress with ease.

Gather project ideas with forms

WorkForms make it easy to gather project ideas, suggestions, or requests in one place. Anyone—whether teammates, managers, or external stakeholders—can submit a form with key information to evaluate the idea's business need. Submissions appear automatically in the "New Requests" group of your project approval pipeline board. 

Set up your project approval board 

Next up: organizing the incoming ideas! The "Project approval pipeline" board is the foundation of your project management workflow. It helps you centralize all new project ideas in one place, review each request, assign project managers, define budgets, and approve the projects that move forward.

Ideas submitted via the form are captured in the board's first group and move through different approval stages. The board's columns represent important details to help decision-makers evaluate each proposal.

Build a high-level project overview board

Once the projects are approved, it's time to track them from a broader perspective. The high-level project overview board helps you see how your approved projects align with larger business goals. This board will automatically populate approved projects from our project approval pipeline board.

To connect your approval pipeline with the high-level overview board, start by setting up a cross-board automation. This automation is triggered when a project's approval status changes to "Approved", automatically creating a new item on the high-level board to begin tracking progress.

A new item in the high-level project overview board will automatically be created in the "Upcoming projects" group. With the help of automations, your project will move between different groups based on where it stands.

Create and manage low-level project boards

Let's zoom into the details! While the high-level board gives you strategic oversight, each project also needs its own workspace for managing the day-to-day—this will require a dedicated, low-level board. 

Once again, automations will be used to create a low-level board for each project. When a project phase changes to "Planning" on the high-level project overview board, an entire low-level project board will be created from a template. This becomes your team's space to schedule, assign, and manage the work.

Let's say you're launching a "Bot project". Its low-level board, generated from the template, will break the project into smaller deliverables and help manage timelines, resources, and budgets. Let's take a closer look at how each one can be implemented using different board features.

Manage timelines with scheduling tools

Dependencies 

Dependencies help you link related tasks and keep everything in sync. Choose from different dependency types (FS, SS, FF, SF) and response modes (Flexible, Strict, or No action) based on how you want items to react to changes.

Gantt Chart

Dependencies can be visualized using the Gantt view, where arrow lines connect tasks that are dependent on each other. You can customize the view to highlight priorities and milestones for easy navigation.

Planned vs actual timeline

Track planned vs. actual timelines by adding a Timeline column for your project plan and a Date column to measure the actual date of completion. Use automation to set the actual completion date when a task's status column changes to "Done."

To analyze delays, add a Formula column that calculates the difference between your planned and actual dates for each item. We can then use this data for different reports to gain better insights into our planning process. 

Milestones

Mark key milestones directly on the timeline. They'll appear as diamonds in both the Timeline and Gantt views, helping your team spot major checkpoints at a glance.

Manage team effort, workload, and costs

Resource management 

Use the Workload View to visualize each team member's capacity. This helps prevent overload and ensures everyone's working efficiently across your project.

Cost Management 

A well-managed budget keeps everything on track. Add a Numbers Column to capture expenses for each task and a Dropdown column to categorize cost types:

Then, use a Chart View to break down costs by type or compare expenses to the approved budget with a Bar chart.

There you have it! All the necessary requirements to set up your low-level project board—now you can manage your schedule, workload, and cost all in one place!  

Get insights with dashboards

Now it's time to see the big picture. Dashboards give you a clear, visual overview of key project metrics and keep your team aligned.

Click to view the widgets you can use:

• Timeline Widget to visualize project phases
• Pie chart widget to track the status of all projects
• Workload Widget to monitor team capacity
• Bar chart widget to compare budget vs. actual expenses

Summary 

To summarize our project management workflow: 

• Project ideas are submitted via WorkForms and reviewed in the project approval pipeline board.
• Approved projects are automatically added to your high-level overview board to keep track of progress using the cross-board automation.
• When a project phase moves to "Planning", a detailed low-level board is created from a template, and the PM is notified.
• The project team uses the low-level board to manage schedules, resources, and budgets throughout execution.
• A dedicated high-level dashboard keeps everything visible, measurable, and on track.

And just like that, you've got everything you need to take your projects from idea to execution—all with monday.com!