Anyone who’s tackled a huge project understands the importance of organization. A successful construction workflow is well thought out and outlined in advance, tracking progress and development throughout the projects. So, what makes a great construction workflow stand out? Let's take a look at an example of a construction workflow using monday.com!

This guide will walk you through two interconnected boards that you can use to get started, and one useful contact board. The first board, called "Project Overview", is a high-level board that collects and tracks all running projects. The second, called "Project Details", is a low-level board, breaking down the details of each project and their progress. The third board, called "Contractors" is a contact sheet, compiling all external contractors for easy and smooth collaboration. 

Get to know these boards with us and watch your productivity skyrocket! 📈

Project Overview

With so many construction projects being so multi-faceted and spanning across a vast timeline, we need to be able to take a look at the big picture. High-level boards are an excellent way to check up on the status of complicated projects. Rather than getting into the nitty-gritty details of our projects, we can quickly glance at our "Project Overview" board to gain insights on our project's highlights. 

Each item on our board is a different project. Our board organizes our projects into those currently "In Construction" and those that are already "Done" by sorting them into the group that represents their working status ("In Construction" or "Done"). Information about the projects is filled into the various columns across the board. 

 

 

Let's take a look at some of the columns we've used to create this board:

• Item Name Column (first column on your board) - records the name of the project, which can either be an area, address, or unit number
• Location Column - links the project's address (we'll discuss this later in this article)
• People Column - allows us to assign the project manager responsible for each project
• Status Column - to record the general status of each project and the statuses of each construction phase
• Date Column - to record the date on which construction began on each project
• Connect boards Column - connecting our project overviews to the corresponding detailed item in our second board, "Project Details"
• Mirror Column - mirroring the Progress Column on our second board

 

Link and mirror your boards

The Connect boards and Mirror Columns are advanced columns that work together to allow you to tie your two boards together where information crosses over.

While our "Project Overview" board gives us a general, high-level overview of the status of our many projects, our "Project Details" board dives a little deeper. In order to take a quick look at this summary without needing to have all of the same detailed information in our "Project Overview" board, we've just linked each item on our high-level board to the corresponding board using the Connect boards Column. To summarize the status of all of the phases on each project, we've added a Progress Tracking Column to our "Project Details" board. We took this one step further by adding a Mirror Column to embed the Progress Tracking Column from our second board so that we can see the project status without having to flip back and forth between boards!

 

Automate your Workflow

To make our lives a little easier, and to make sure that our board is always up-to-date, we've added a few useful automations to our board. 

The automation below moves all finished projects from the group "In Construction" to the group "Done" as soon as the label is changed to "Job completed" in the Status Column. 

 

 

View your data however you want

In order to gain a different perspective, our board is equipped with several board views to visually represent the board's raw data! For this board, our board views give more of an overview of all of our construction projects to give us a big picture impression of our progress!

For example, the Workload View shows us the distribution of our status labels across our projects. We hire a subcontractor for our projects' roofing and we can only schedule two different projects with our roofing specialist per week. We use the Workload View to help us make sure our projects are spread out across our project's timeline according to each week's workload capacity. A checkmark signifies that we have reached our weekly capacity, and a circle within a circle means that we can schedule more work on that particular week! This way, we can easily understand where everything stands, and make changes to our schedule and subcontracting where needed. 

 

The Map View shows a map of the area, with markers plotting the location of the projects in construction.  We can use the map to plan deliveries to the site, understand distances and proximity between sites, and calculate travel times.  

We can click on any of our markers to highlight the project's address, and even view the item card directly in this view to see more details!

 

Project Details

We've already reviewed a high-level overview of all of our company's activities, so now we'll take a closer look at how to manage all of the small tasks involved in a building project. We can successfully manage the details of our construction projects by tracking our progress, deadlines and more, using this low-level board.

Our board organizes each project (item) into groups according to the construction phase they are currently in. The groups range from "In construction" and "In quality control" to "Done" and "Future" projects. The board is full of project details, including the status of specific stages and their deadlines, and the subcontractors responsible for relevant stages. 

 

 

 

Let's take a look at some of the columns we have in this board:

• Location Column - links the project's address
• Progress Tracking Column - generates a battery-style chart of all Status Columns in the item to show an overall progress percentage (as we saw mirrored in our "Project Overview" board).
• Status Column - to mark the general status of the project, and of individual project phases.
• People Column - allows us to assign the project manager and quality control specialist responsible for each project
• Several combinations of Status Columns and Date Columns set in deadline mode to indicate the status of each phase accompanied by the phase's deadline.
• A combination of a Status Column and a Timeline Column set in deadline mode to indicate the status of cabinet installation accompanied by the phase's timeline. 
• Connect boards Column - connecting our cabinets phase to the corresponding subcontractor working on it in our third board, "Subcontractors" (more on this later in the article)
• File Column - to upload any PDFs, images, or other documents related to the project

As our construction team advances through the different phases of the project, they change the statuses of each phase to represent their progress. Seeing the deadline beside each phase helps our team stay focused and stick to our goals. Using this board to update exactly where our team stands in the construction of each project promotes transparency and communication within our team while ensuring that managers always know where things stand. 

 

Keep things moving with automations

To make sure that our workflow stays smooth and seamless, we've added a few automations. 

The automation below notifies our team in their Bell Notifications Center when the deadline for our "Framing" phase arrives. This makes sure we never miss a deadline, and will be able to make all of the last-minute fixes we need before moving on to the next phase of our project. We can add an identical notification, and customize it to notify us when the deadline arrives for any of our other critical phases, such as cabinet installation, and permit acquisitions! 

Another useful automation (pictured below) changes our project status column's label to "QC" when we change the label of the final phase of our project, Quality Control, to "In progress". This automation helps keep all of the information in our item up to date for us so that we don't have to keep checking for consistencies. We can add a similar recipe to update our project status column's label to "Job completed" when our final phase is done, or "Stuck" when we hit a roadblock on any of our phases. 

  Transform your board

For every phase in our board, we have a date or deadline, making sure we stay on track. But dates can be difficult to visualize, and always seem a little further away than they are in reality. The Timeline View shows all of our items in a chart-style calendar, allowing us to visualize all of our approaching deadlines, and to understand whether our team is keeping up with our projects, or needs a little push. 

 

 

If you're visual like us, you'll love using the Chart View to quickly review your information in one glance! The bar chart we've added below shows us the distribution of labels across all of our items in the cabinet installation phase. With our chart, we can see how many projects are completed, versus how many are "delayed by vendor"  or "delayed by builders". We can add as many charts as we need, and customize them exactly how we want, from the type of chart (pie, bar, line, and more!) to choosing values and columns for the x and y axes!

 

Subcontractors 

Managing and communicating internally with our teams is easy with the great project management boards we've shown you. However, when we involve external parties, communication and management can get a little trickier. To try to make communication with our valued subcontractors a little easier, we've created a contact board to keep track of everyone and the jobs they are responsible for. The board is organized into structural and service contractors, and includes the type of work they do, their contact address, phone number, and email address,  and a "Subcontractor Log" showing us when we created our partnership!

 

 

In our previous board, "Job Details", we've added a Connect boards Column, connecting each project's cabinet installation phase with the subcontractor responsible for installation. If we ever run into an issue with our cabinets, we can click on the link, and open up the subcontractor's item card, giving us all the information we need to know in order to contact him or her quickly!

 

We can create similar links for any of our subcontractors beside the phase they are contracted to build for us! 

 

Add a dashboard!

You can create a dashboard connected to your Construction Workflow boards (and any other relevant boards) to get a great visual overview of your construction projects loaded with apps and widgets!  Let's check out a few widgets that might help us get a big-picture view of our projects:

• The Timeline Widget shows us the time span of our projects in a comprehensive calendar. The items are color-coded corresponding to the boards they belong in, so we know where to go for more details!

• The Chart Widget generates charts based on the data in our boards! The first chart (on the left) shows us the breakdown of the Status Column in our "Project details" board, giving us the big picture of where everything on our entire board stands.
• The second chart is a Battery Widget, giving us an overview of how many projects are completed and how many are in progress.

• The Board to Globe Widget is an interactive globe reflecting geo-location data from the location columns on our boards. 

 

 

 

Get creative

These three boards are intended to be a starting point to help you translate your workflow into a monday.com workflow! You can use these exact boards in your workflow if they're right for you, but don't be afraid to experiment and test out all of the amazing features on monday.com! Make sure to check out other prepared templates and explore the Columns Center to see all of the ways you can use columns as building blocks to customize your own one-of-a-kind board! You can make your own automations and enable integrations to really connect the dots in your workflow!

 

 

 

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