Hi everyone, my name is Kuren and welcome to Firing Up Your Productivity Webinar. We're going to be taking a deep dive into monday.com board views. I'm going to be managing the chat box and Lee Watkins is going to be leading the call. Um, hello, my name is Lee. I'm a software trainer at Omnitas. Um, I'm originally from the US, as you can probably tell from my accent, but I've been living in the UK for 12 years where we, of course, celebrate Guy Fawkes Night in November. Today we have a Bonfire Night themed webinar, and we're going to discuss using monday.com board views to best illuminate your workflow in the dark night sky of disorganized project management and chaotic task administration. Using board views correctly will make your projects shine. Uh, our use case today is the organization of a Bonfire Night event, and we're going to demonstrate how timeline, Kanban, and other views can bring clarity to a noisy workflow and the versatility of these functions to fit lots of different processes. I'll give you a little bit of historical background about Guy Fawkes Night, which is also known as Bonfire Night. It's a traditional British holiday celebrated on November 5th to commemorate the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and to give our webinar some context. Our use case is a real life example of planning a spectacular bonfire night with a fireworks display. We're going to use Monday.com board views to make that happen. I'll just show you our agenda for today. Okay. Cool. So we have had our introduction. So I'll mark that as done. Next we will talk about what board views are. And then we're going to discuss these types of board views table Gantt timeline workload Kanban form chart and file. So first of all what is a board view? Um. Adding a visual demonstration of an abstract concept can really help to quickly understand complex processes at a glance. And the use of board views within Monday enables you to view the information you've added to the board from a different perspective. You can filter it by a particular person if you wanted to see all the tasks related to yourself, for example, or by all unfinished tasks. You can also produce reports with charts and graphs, and share specific views with senior management if they want an understanding of progression at a glance. There are many uses of board views. We can't possibly get to all of them, but I hope that today's discussion gets you excited about how you can incorporate them into your workflow. I'm going to start us off by looking at our main table. And we are looking at our main table and in our case, we have a list of tasks related to our Bonfire Night party. We are using the following columns. We have a person column to indicate who's responsible for the task. A status column to show whether the task is complete, in progress, or stuck. We have a timeline to show when each task begins and ends. I've included dependencies here to show which tasks must be completed before others can be started, and we also have a location column to show where a task takes place. The location column is not as relevant for our pre-planning stage here, but it becomes more important closer to the day when we have tasks leading up to the party launch, including some pickups that have to happen on the day leading up to the event. Here's our table view. This is the general indication of a table view. And I'm going to show different ways of filtering that table view. So for example here I have a filter for everything assigned to me. You can create different main table views to have more of a dynamic and organized workspace. So for example you can have filters for everything assigned to me all stock items and an executive view with some columns hidden. And using filters like this can help you manage your planning more efficiently. The first view we're discussing is this table view, which is a filter view of the main table of the board, and it includes all the items from our main table but filtered through that particular lens. In this case, I have a filter for tasks assigned to myself and it's dynamic. So because it says me dynamic, this is going to change according to who's viewing the board. And then I've saved it as a specific view and I've saved it to this tab. My tasks. So depending on who views this board, it will show all of the tasks assigned to that specific person. I could also filter it to Lee Watkins myself and that would be static. So anybody accessing the board would see the tasks for Lee Watkins as opposed to for myself but dynamic. We'll talk about an additional table view which is stuck. Tasks. So by filtering by status, I've created a tab which lists all of the items in the board listed as stuck. And here's my filter status. Stuck. Here are all the items that correspond to that filter. I can always return to my main table to view the rest of the items that don't correspond to that original filter, and this is unchanged, right? The essential information remains the same. Finally, I have an executive view. For this view. I've hidden the. I can hide the dependencies and I can hide other columns as well. So here's here's me viewing all of the columns. But maybe you want to create a view that is simpler for a senior stakeholder. They may not want to see every little bit of granular detail, and they might just want to see the really big important thing. So I'm going to hide a bunch of these columns. And here's a more simple view and I'll save that to this view as well. So now we have our executive view. And this is much easier than preparing a report every week or every month when that person wants an update on progress. And unlike a status report, this view is evergreen and provided that you continue to update the main table. Um, continually, this is going to be more relevant than a static report that comes out every week or every month. Okay, cool. So we're going to move on in a minute to Gantt view. I just want to check in with Karen briefly. Karen do we have any questions? No questions so far. Lee you're good to go. All right. So we will look at our Gantt view. And I'm going to share my screen again. So this view is ideal for displaying tasks over time. The Gantt view transforms the main board's data into a dynamic Gantt style chart. The view is adaptable, interactive, and it visually illustrates important milestones as well as task dependencies. So these arrows and lines, they draw a path through the dependencies that were illustrated in our dependency column in the main table. It's especially useful if you're working in waterfall method, where you have sequential phases, each of which have to end before the next one begins. In order to use Gantt view, you're going to need to have either the timeline or the date column, and you'll need to have the dependency column if your project has dependencies. It's responsive, which means that I can change the dates from the view itself, and the main table is going to change to reflect the changes that I make here. Additionally, if your project has dependencies, moving one task along will cause all subsequent tasks to change as well on a matically, and this saves a lot of time and effort. So, for example, if our budget is stuck. And it doesn't get completed on time. I can move this along and change the dates, and everything that's dependent on that item is going to also move along. Okay. So now things that are dependent on that budget item are getting pushed into the future as well. So this saves you from having to manually update each individual task related to that prior task if something is delayed. Cool. I'm going to briefly explain critical path and baseline settings, so it's worth noting that both critical path and baseline are features for the Gantt chart that are currently in beta. Baseline is only available to pro and enterprise users, and Critical Path as a trial feature that might in future require payment. So when you activate Critical Path. Which I will do in our settings. So I can hide it, or I can show our critical path. And essentially what it's going to do is it's going to show all of the items which are dependent on other items that have to happen for those subsequent tasks to occur. It'll highlight the project timeline in red, like here, to show the critical path. So the schedule of events that have to be cleaned on time for the overall project to finish on schedule. So if you have tasks that maybe are not critical, they're not related to other things. Things are not dependent on them. They're going to be hidden in the critical path view, since they're not necessary to reach your ultimate goal. I've also set up. A baseline here. So our event was originally meant to be launched on the 5th of November, but it's been delayed to the ninth. And the gray bars represent the original date that each of these tasks was set to occur. So we can compare our original timeline with the one originally planned. So here we can see that the declaration pickup was meant to be all the way back here, and it's been pushed forward to here. And we can see that the budget was originally here and it was pushed forward as well. And because I've taken a snapshot before those changes have occurred, it's just marking for us what our original plans were. So this is a really useful feature for keeping track of changes from our original plans and being able to compare, um, things that have happened on schedule, like these prior tasks. They are overlapping with their their baseline snapshot, two things that have been delayed and pushed forward. -Cool. -So now we'll move on to Timeline view. So while these might seem like similar views because they represent items over time, Timeline and Gantt have some key differences. So a Gantt chart is a two dimensional representation of task sequences and their interdependencies, whereas the timeline is a more straightforward linear display of events. So the Gantt chart provides a detailed, granular view of the project, showcasing information such as current task status, task priorities, milestones, and so on. Gantt is for a more granular view of individual tasks, while timeline is for more of a bird's eye view or a high level overview. So in this case for timeline, you can use one of the following columns. You will. Sorry. You'll need one of the following columns timeline, date, or week. And then we can view each of these actions based on what time they're going to occur. We can customize the timeline view in a number of ways, and in our case, I've sorted the tasks by the person responsible and I've colored the items by their progress. So based on this view, I know who will be working on what task when in a handy visual way. You could also you could do this differently if you wanted to. You don't have to group it by person. You could. You could do it by group. For example, here each of the stages. And you could also color this differently. So instead of coloring by status, if you wanted to look at it in a different way, you could color it by person. So now it's organized by group and we know that Pink is Robbie. Yellow is Thomas. And so on. So this is this is very changeable depending on how it is that you want to use it. And I'm going to go back to changing things to status and grouping it by person. Cool. Just a quick one there Lee. We just received another question which was around. Can you assign tasks to actual teams or groups of people? Yes, absolutely. You can create teams which are groups of people, and you can assign tasks to them, and it will represent in the same way here, except that instead of writing Lee Watkins, it'll be H.R. Team, for example, or communications team. -Yes. -Thanks very much. Thanks. -Uh, cool. -So this is a nice segue into our workload widget. Cool. This view helps to optimize your resource management, and there are many scenarios where this tool can be helpful. I'm going to just minimize to collapse each of these items. Cool. So this is a simpler the simplest for oh hang on. There we go. Now you're minimized. Okay, so there are many scenarios in which you might want to use this tool. For example, you might want to distribute tasks among different individuals or teams, as we previously mentioned, without exceeding the capacity of each person or each team. Or you might be doing resource allocation and trying to stay within predefined limits, such as restaurant table seating or managing employee time capacity. In order to use this tool, you're going to need. You need to use the following columns. You need to have a people column, a date or a timeline, uh, and a number or a formula column if you want to indicate effort for each task. So this is relevant if some tasks are longer than others or if there's a different amount of work needed. So for example, I've given everyone a max capacity of five tasks. And we can see here that some people are closer or further away from being overloaded. If someone does become overloaded, I can show you what that looks like. So let's change this from Robbie to Thomas. So Thomas is at capacity. That's what the check mark means. And then if I wanted to make him overloaded, I could push one of these items further into the future. Hang on. I'm just trying to drag this over so that it becomes red. There we go, red. Okay, so this means that he has been assigned to many tasks for that time period. And this is really useful for knowing at a glance who is overburdened, who is not being utilized as much. Um, and who is, you know, has less work. So I can I'll redistribute this so that it's better balanced. Cool. And now nobody -is overburdened. -Just just another question there. Lee can. Let's say the admin, for instance. Can that person be notified when someone's -at capacity within their team? -So unfortunately, no. You would have to visually check to see if someone is overburdened. We can't set up an automatic notification to say this -is exceeding their limit. -Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. -No problem. -Can see that we've just received another question as well. So how does it split the time if more than one person works on a -task? -Okay. Good question. Essentially you can tell it how to split that time so you can go into effort and capacity. You can change the settings depending on um, if one person has more capacity than another, you can give one person 40 hours a week and another person 20 hours a week. Um, you can also ask it to define to divide the effort, let's say 5050. You can alter how that works. So the question of how does it split the time? It splits the time in the way that you designated to. -Awesome. Thank you very much, Lee. -No problem. Um, I've just remembered. I need to go back and illustrate something with Gant. So we. We spoke about Gant briefly. We talked about baselines. So here's our baseline snapshot of when the event, uh, tasks were meant to be completed. And then here's the actual. And I just want to make a comment that when you, uh, when you do that, it will automatically create. A baseline column for you. And it will also create a column, a formula column which shows you the difference in days between the originally planned completion date and the actual completion date. So just a small note to wrap up our our Gantt view. I'm going to move on to Kanban. Cool. So here is our Kanban view. And the Kanban view organizes items by status. It generates cards. So each card represents an item and it'll put it into streams that. So the labels are generated from status columns. And this is a visual representation of sorting items by their status into different piles and comparing items of one type versus another. So for example you could compare finished versus unfinished tasks. Which is what I've done here. So we are representing working on it. Tasks stuck and done. You could also toggle this to be represented differently. So let's say you wanted this one over here okay cool. And you can also change how much information you give to each card. So for example maybe you want to know if there's a time difference between the originally planned completion and the actual completion. So I've added that bit of information to each card now. Or maybe you want to make it simpler, and you don't need to know the location, or you don't need to know that time difference. You can make it less complex. So can mean is visually very similar to card view. They both represent items as cards, but card View does not use status columns, which is what Kanban is doing here. All right. So we're going to move on to our map view. And as we move on to the tasks that are closer to our event, our map view comes into play. We need to make a series of pickups leading up to the event, and it's relevant to us now to know the location of each of those pickups. The map view lets you see your project on a map, hence the name. So it's really good for projects and tasks related to specific places. I'm going to just zoom out here so we have little purple dots for different activities that need to happen. We have a firework pickup here and Chingford. We have a decorations pick up here in Stratford. And so on. The map view shows you where each task is, and it makes it simple to assign tasks via location and to understand how proximity affects your projects. So the map view is generated either from a location column, which is the column that I've used, or from a country column. And in our case, because we have a series of pickups to make before the event launches at once. Mr. Pier. I'm going to start with Westminster Pier and then work my way backwards to figure out. Um, essentially from back to front, how we should complete our tasks so that we end close to the event. Um, we're going to imagine we're renting a car for this purpose or a van, and we want to minimize the overall distance and time spent driving the car. We also want to pick up the vehicle from a location that makes the most sense, given the sequence of tasks. And the question I want the map to answer is in what order should we perform the pickups? So I'm working backwards from the venue location in Westminster to understand what order the tasks should be done in. So here's our event launch at Westminster Pier and our next closest task. Is our caterer in south London, near the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth. Then we have a wine pick up from Majestic Drinks. You might want to leave this closer to the venue as drinks are easier to break. Hopefully they're adequately. Adequately stored to avoid breaking glass. Then we have our decorations back up here in Stratford. And finally we have our fireworks pick up up in Chingford. So it makes the most sense to pick up our vehicle from Chingford, then make the fireworks pick up, then the decorations. Then the drinks. So. So just for clarification there, Lee. Um, so is there a way to actually map out and actually show what that route plan would actually look like directly in the map view, as that's one of the questions that -we've received. -Okay. I'm not sure that's possible. And in any case I would. I would recommend doing that in like a journey planning tool rather than in this map view. So I would recommend doing this in, let's say, Google Maps rather than in this tool. -Okay. -Great. Thanks very much, Lee. No problem. I'm not sure it's possible to map it. In a way that makes sense. By the way, I did check drawing time for all of these stops, and theoretically, with no traffic and no delays, it would take you an hour and 20 minutes. Realistically, of course, I would give at least a whole day to complete this, and potentially even complete pickups a week before or a few days before. For the purpose of the webinar, I'm planning all the pickups for one day. This is not a super realistic plan, it's more that the purpose of the webinar is to talk about board views. Um, London is not a no traffic zone, so that's probably not a good idea. But in any case, the map enables us to plan with location in mind, and it's easier than looking at a series of addresses in text form, because if you're looking at a series of addresses, that's not going to immediately tell you what is -close to another thing. -We've just received another question as well. So once the pickups have been completed, does it change the -color of the pin at all? -Um, the way it set up now? No, I guess I could theoretically have a setting where these pins change, but no, because this is sort of by group. So these are all purple because the the items that need to be completed on the day of the launch are part of the group, and that group is purple. We have one more location here that's pink. And that's because it's in the the post-event list of tasks. But I could also change it so that when I say this task is done, um, then it gets moved into a different group and then it would be colored differently. I could set it up like that. I just haven't I haven't done -that right now. -Awesome. Thank you very much, Lisa. Yeah, just to answer your question there, George. Um, absolutely. Of course, you know, once you mark something as completed, it can move into another group and therefore the pin changes color. Cool. Okay, great. So now we're going to transition to viewing our post-event feedback. So I'm going to go to our feedback form. I have created a table here to collect feedback from our Bonfire Night attendees. So I'm going to start with our feedback form, which is here. And I probably want to view this as if I'm someone who is completing the form. So I'm going to click preview. Cool. All right. So monday.com forms are really useful. And they make it easy to collect and integrate data into the platform. You can customize your own forms to gather info from clients, team members, other people, and they're really simple to share. You can share a link, you can embed the form and so on. Using forms really helps you add data smoothly into your board. We're not focusing on the topic of forms today. That's not our topic. But if there's enough interest, then I'll do another web form webinar on work forms in the future. So since our main board is populated with real people, real historical people who were involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, I'm going to submit a new form as Guy Fawkes. And his email address is going to be G fox@conspirators.org. Probably he would not be as obvious about it if he was planning something nefarious in real life, but is it's useful for us to keep track. Um, he did not have a great time at the event because he got caught, but he did think the venue was very nice. So that's going to be reflected in his feedback. Um, would you be interested in hearing about know More? Would you be interested in hearing of more events with us? His answer is no, because he's going to get executed. So there's really no point in him subscribing to our newsletter. And then we're going to add a photo of him here. Guy Fox again, not a super realistic use case. I wouldn't normally ask event attendees to share photographs themselves. Um, but it would make the authorities. It would be a lot easier for the authorities to catch the conspirators if they'd had photos and uploaded them to our board. So I'm going to submit this form here. Okay, cool. And then I'm going to return to our prior tab. So here's our prior tab. And here is our main table. Okay cool. And now we have a new response G Fox. And he is part of our. Board of of historically, historically real people who either were part of the conspiracy. Or were involved in catching the conspiracy. I'm going to move on to our chart view. So we're looking at the same information but from a different perspective. The chart view can help you analyze the data in your workflow, and I'm using it to compare the feedback for different questions, for different feedback questions. You could also use it to assess team members performance, track task completion speed, show changes over time, and explore lots of different possibilities for data analysis. It's very, very changeable, but in this case I've just set up a neat little chart. Comparing how many how people felt about the location. So we had two people who didn't like it. Six who thought it could be better? Seven who really liked it? We have a little pie chart to show who sign up for the newsletter and who did not. And we also have a handy little average rating out of five stars. How much people enjoyed the event overall. Um, cool. So I'm going to move on to our files gallery. And here is our files gallery showing all of the images within the platform. I apologize, that guy Fox Image is not coming through. Perhaps it's a ploy to prevent the authorities from finding him. But in any case, we have photos of no photos. Sorry, drawings. Paintings, illustrations of many of the other conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. And this would have been really useful for law enforcement, too, to find them. If Monday had existed at the time. Users can organize and view files in a gallery style format, which makes it easier to locate, preview and access documents and images. And the benefits of the files view includes like a visual representation of the files, you can drag and drop things to upload them, and you can create a project. You can start. You can centralize project related files through this board. This is probably this might not be exactly how I would generally use it. You could use it for legal documents, for word documents or PDFs, other things. You can obviously also use it for images. It's really up to you. It's really handy as a database for files of any kind. So the Files Gallery is a visually intuitive and efficient way to handle project related documents and images. On Monday. I would consider monday.com views like form and cod. And map as more niche and less commonly used, but they can be very valuable when they are needed, such as for location planning, data collection, and managing specific tasks, even if they're not the most frequently used views. I'm coming to the end of our of our board, of our planned, uh, of our planned topics. So I'm going to take us back to our agenda. We discussed what board views are. We discussed tables and filtering tables. We talked about Gantt and we talked about critical path and baseline within Gantt. We also talked about settings on timeline. On workload. Gantt or filtering by status in cards. We had an overview of our chart. I showed you our forms view with our collecting, our feedback. And we also showed our files Gallery. So now the only thing left we have is our Q&A. So I'll stop sharing my screen now. Do we have anything we want to talk about for -our Q&A? -No questions in our side. So guys, thanks so much for participating. -And hope to see you soon. Thank you very. -Much. Okay great. Thanks very much everyone. Take care.