Is Monday.com any good for localization project managers?
Welcome to our newest series, where every month we’ll check out a new project management platform and see how viable it is for localization. All online software will be either free or with a free trial, so you can try it on your own.
In this video, I’ll show you how to use Monday.com to schedule your localization projects. Together, we’ll plan two simple projects and create one dashboard.
Andrej Zito
If you’re active on the internet, there’s a pretty good chance that in the last week, you have seen at least one ad from monday.com. The question is, can you use monday.com to manage your localization projects?
Andrej Zito
This will be a new series where I want to try out these new modern platforms, project management, team collaboration, work management software, however you want to call it, they allow you to do many, many different things. But what we’ll be focusing on in the series is to see how you can actually use them to manage your localization projects. So this series will be mostly there for the project managers. From my experience, most of you are probably using Excel spreadsheet, and there’s nothing wrong with it, because spreadsheet gives us a lot of flexibility. But I wanted to try out some of these new modern software platforms to see if they can be used for our projects.
Andrej Zito
We’re going to have a very simple scenario, I will be scheduling two projects, one of them is very simple, just translational review delivery. The second one is more complicated. There are different sets of tasks for different languages. So this makes things a little bit more complicated. And you can see how I dealt with it using monday.com. And then finally, I’m going to create a dashboard, which sort of unites the information from the two projects that we created so that you can see your project in just one central view. So you can manage your project at the same time, and you don’t have to click through each project. You should also know that I’m just simply sticking to the free version of monday.com. So if you want, you can follow me or you can just give it a try for your own actual real projects. I think I said enough, let’s get right into monday.com so I can show you how I created the project. And you can follow me if you want to, when you create account, you will probably have a different first screen that you see once you look into monday.com, because I was already trying to create some test projects before.
Andrej Zito
I’m going to start from my main workspace that was already created for me. And the way that we’re going to create the projects, our localization projects and the schedules for them is by having them on a board. There are a lot of ways how you can think about and what I’m going to do, I’m going to have one project on each separate board. So let’s create our first board, which will be our first project, you can select a few templates here, which are specifically for project management, but I’m going to create one from scratch. Okay, board name, we’re just simply going to call it project A and create a board and let’s start filling it out for our project. Do you want to save this? No, go away. So first of all, this is a project. For this one, we’re going to keep it very simple. And we’re just going to have one scope for all the languages in this project. So that means I don’t need another group. And I’ll just delete it. So we’ll be fine just with one group. In the next project, I’ll show you how we can utilize the different groups. So for this group, I’m just going to say that this will be German, French, Japanese, and Korean. Okay, and when it comes to the columns, so first of all the columns that we’re going to be using date, I don’t use a date here, because date is just doesn’t show the duration. So I’m going to remove a date. And instead we’re going to add a timeline. So timeline is going to indicate to us when the item starts, and when it ends, and by item will basically mean the task. Here are some statuses where you find by Monday, for now, we can keep it as it is for this level of items. I’ll show you how the status works on a different level of items in a while. And let’s start planning scheduling. Okay, so first, we’re going to start this is a very simple project with a translation. And maybe I can indicate that this one is 30k. Okay, so this is the translation and we assume that all the languages are running in parallel for translation. So it would be very easy to put this on the timeline, and I’m actually going to do it and what we’re going to do is we’re going to pretend that we started the last Monday, one week ago, so 26th. Okay. So we started 26th and because it’s 30k, it’s going to take us three weeks so 1, 2, 3. So until Friday, hopefully I’m correct. Okay.
Andrej Zito
Now what is important for me, when I’m going to be testing these softwares is the ability to go deeper in your monitoring, gain status tracking. So what I normally teach my students is that it’s okay that you have your schedule for all four languages. But there are, let’s say, multiple sub milestones or sub stages that you go through in order to get the translation done, right. And what I mean by that is that I don’t know you have heads-up, you send the heads-up for task, then the heads up gets confirmed. Then you send the handoff, then that handoff gets confirmed, and then hopefully you get the delivered translation. So this is what we’re going to be tracking on this level. So here, I added the sub items. From here, let me show you if this works. So here we are, this is the main level of items. And here I’m going to add a sub item. As you can see, it’s still in a beta. I don’t know why. But it’s working pretty fine. The problem is that you cannot go another level. So here, if I’m on the sub item level, I cannot add another sub item can only create new sub items above or below which means is the same level.
Andrej Zito
So the way that I use this is that we have this main task about translation. So I’m going to create sub items for each language. So translation, okay, we’re going to have French, we’re going to have Japanese and Korean, okay. The reason why I drag this is that we want to track the sub stages for these individual tasks for each language. And so I’m going to do that by modifying the statuses. One thing that is worth noting is that these statuses that you define here, are independent from the statuses that are defined on this level. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to delete all of these things, I’m going to leave this one that sort of like not started, and what I’m going to add is I’m going to add two yellow ones, and then two, green ones, okay. Now move this to the bottom, because I want the status just to be ordered in a way that I will probably go through the stages. I’ll mix it a little bit like this. And what I’m going to do is here, this is heads up, sent. This one will be a heads up, conference, this one will be sent. So we’ll be then confirmed. And I need one more, which I forgot, I’ll use the black one will be delivered. Okay, I’ll click Apply. And so what it means is that here, I can track as a project manager, when I had to know send the heads up for German. And maybe the French translator has already confirmed that they’re available for the task. And then when one, once the time comes for the handoff, I’m going to once I send the handoff to all the languages, I’m going to set everything hand up send. And I want the translators to confirm. So let’s say the French and Japanese ticket firm. And for some reason, I think this status is set to something special. Because of that animation, it’s looks like it’s considering is done. I don’t know where exactly I can set it or if it’s just because it’s the green one. Anyway. So this is how you can utilize the status. One important thing that I have to share with you is that you can also define the columns for the sub items. And again, these are independent from these ones. So if by any chance your languages are running on a different schedule, what you can do is you can define it here. So let’s say this one is starting from 26th. And it ends on August 14, so the same as the, let’s say the main task and let’s say for French, we would have it start from 26. But we give an A one extra day to the French translator. Okay.
Andrej Zito
Now, here’s the thing. You have this option to show summary on parent item, which is super useful to me. And what it does it then it shows the the timeline of the site sub items, and it shows from the earliest to the latest one. So now you can see that instead of showing it from July 26, to August 13, it also shows until August 16, that’s because the French, and so on August 16. So if I change this French to finish on, I don’t know, maybe 18th, you can see that it immediately changed here as well. This is very useful. The problem that I found with this one is that this column here, let me collapse the sub items. So these columns here, only works for the sub items. So for for the tasks where you don’t have any sub items, you cannot enter anything, you would need to enter the date through the sub items. And in case you have some tasks that don’t need to be tracked for each language separately, then you might utilize different column or to timeline to send the dates. But then it’s a little bit confusing, because then you have the dates in two different columns. Now, soon, I will show you how this looks like on the Gantt chart. And even if you have two different columns with timelines, you can still use both columns to show the tasks correctly on the Gantt chart. But the problem is that it looks very weird here in this table to you. So this is really your preference.
Andrej Zito
The advantage with this is again, like I mentioned that if you change it on the, let’s say, the language level here on the sub item level, to speak in terms of Monday, it will automatically update here. But the problem is that you will have two columns for the date. So for now, I’m just going to delete this. And that’s it. Good thing is that you can also use Ctrl C and Ctrl V on the timeline. So I copied the timeline from here, and I can paste it to the other languages. Let’s This one is handled sent. Okay, so this is our translation. Let’s continue with the next task which will be review. And here, I’m just going to say that it’s 40 hours, there’s a way how you can also track the scope for the tasks in individual, I mean, you can create a column for that, which would indicate it. I’m just using it here so that I can see it. Then in the Gantt chart. And again, I’m going to do the same thing for the review. Oops, not what I wanted to do. So I’m going to add a sub item. Here, we’re going to say it’s German review. And the status, this should be the same one, as you can see here. So this means that the statuses are defined on the sub item level, regardless of the task. So I will not fill this up. But let’s just focus on this part. So if it’s 40 hours, it means it will transition and August 13. So then let’s say we start here, if it’s 40 hours, that’s one week of work, right. And another thing that I forgot to mention before is, this is where I think you can also collaborate easily with the people, because you can add getting assigned owners right here in one day.com. So I assumed that they would get a notification. And they can take over a task. There’s also way like I mentioned before that you can add statuses for the effort. So this is a way how you can notify your reviewers or translators of how much work there is to do. And of course, there’s this thing, conversation so you can communicate with the people right on the task that they’re working on. So I think that’s pretty cool. Status. I wouldn’t be filling it out, but I’d say these guys. Well, they haven’t probably even started right. So I said, we have to be simple heads up. What did I do? I just want to copy this thing. And now I’m a little bit lost. There we go. Okay. And timeline. I would just to be sure. So that would be August 16 to August 20. Yes, thank you and copy this. And okay, we have our review.
Andrej Zito
Right, let me collapse this. And then finally we will just track the delivery date. And that will be let’s say did what am I gonna do? At the same day, so once you, okay, and this is our first project, very simple one, with a granular tracking of each language. For the delivery, I’m not going to add the granularity because I don’t think it’s important, we only want to deliver the whole project at once. There’s one thing this is this was here by default. So this is probably not started yet. Right? Okay, so you can also assign the main task to someone, this one is assigned to me. So here we have the timeline here is the status. Here, we have sort of like, like an aggregator like a total, or all the tasks within the group item. So that might be useful. But what I think is more useful is to have a Gantt chart, there is a special one here. So we’re going to add, so you’re just adding a different view, the data is the same for the project. So this will be our Gantt chart view for this very simple project. And here, you can customize what timelines are used to which columns are used to show the timelines, we only have one right now. But previously, I was telling you that if I had sub item timelines, I could also show dose as a data. So grouping is by group, that’s okay. Because we only have one group here, labeled by name. So this is maybe words good that I put in.
Andrej Zito
So this is basically the name of the items. And I can also see the effort because I put them there, color by group. That’s okay. not that important. And I think which may be might be good for you, I prefer to see it on a day to day basis. And I can also zoom out a little bit. This is the maximum zoom. And this line here shows where we are today. So right now you can see that you are doing the translation. And you’re within these four languages. And that’s your project a right everything here is project a. And then you can see that you were able to stretch from here to there. And here’s the delivery, you can also technically play with the durations here, if you want to. And that’s it. Now that we have the sample project, what I’m going to do is I’m going to create a second project. And for that, maybe I’m going to utilize this one, so I don’t have to set up columns and the status again. So I’ll just duplicate the sport. And I want to duplicate structure only. Let’s see if it works.
Andrej Zito
Okay, so here we are. And this will be project B. Now, for project B, this one will be a little bit more complicated. We will have different scopes, or two sets of languages, or two sets of languages. And we’re also going to add pre processing. So let me start by adding a new group of items. That’s how we’re going to split this. So this will be a group for a language independent. And we’re going to have re sync here. And then we’re going to have group four. Think I do normally German and Japanese. And then we’re going to add one more group, which I would like to drag load this one. No, no. Okay, there we go. And this one won’t be for French, Korean. Okay. Now, when we look at my scope, how we do this pre processing is 10 hours. And let me just load up the tasks here.
Andrej Zito
So this is what we have here. Again, what you could and what maybe you probably should, if you want to really track what is happening with let’s say, German translation. You can add a sub item here. You can assign it to someone if by any chance there on your platform if you want to use it that way. Okay, maybe I should have said that. My first goal is to show how maybe the project managers could use this just for their own tracking. before they go even think about collaborating with all the vendors on monday.com. And here again, you could track the status. Let’s say we sent a handoff and you would add the language sub items where each task where you need it to be. Okay, so I’m just going to collapse it and then this is our project. Maybe if translations that one is down. So this one is working on it. And this one is also being worked on. Actually, this one should be completed by now. Right? So let’s say this one is work, working progress. They get it right, I think I got it right. And we already have the Gantt view here. And this is what I like, except that it’s not set today. So I’m going to set it for days, I’m going to zoom out. And this is our beautiful Gantt chart. This is this is what I really like. And you can even drag and move it around. So this is perfect.
Andrej Zito
So here we can see it’s split into the different groups. And each group has its own, let’s say, sort of timeline. And this is the language independent. This is this. This is the timeline for German and Japanese because they have a different scope. And this is a timeline for French and Korean. So today is August 3, and you know where exactly you are. So you’re doing translation for German, Japanese, and you’re doing DTP for French, and Korean. And here, you can see your delivery. And here’s another delivery. One thing that you can do is for the delivery dates, because there may be important, we can set them as a milestone. And they’ve been the milestones are displayed differently on the Gantt chart with this diamond. Yep, there it is. So this might be useful for you. And this is what I just discovered right? Now, you can easily expand and collapse it just by clicking on it to take it even further away. And this is where I’m going to show you maybe the limitation of monday.com is that Ideally, you want to see overview of all your projects, right? Because you don’t want to see you don’t want to look at here, just okay, this is the project and then you have to go to another project and then look where it is right now you want to sort of have one central view of all your project.
Andrej Zito
So there are a few ways how to do this based on my initial research. So given that we, with these two projects, separately on their own boards, the best thing that I can suggest right now is to create a new dashboard. So I’m going to call this dashboard, my projects. And here we’re going to select the boards that we’re going to get the data from. And we want to use the Gann widget. Okay, so I tried this before, and I think it needs some time to get the information here. So I’m going to give it some time until it loads up the data. And then we’re going to look at how to customize this. Okay, so now we have the projects loaded up here. So let’s play with the settings a little bit what we want to see. And you can also already see that by default, it also shows the timeline of the sub items, which I think is great. Here, we can see that the wrench translation is a little bit longer. But I think the grouping is not correct here. So we want to group it not by groups, but by boards, right? Because each board is a different project for us, right?
Andrej Zito
It’s, we have here project A and project B. And is there something else I’m missing? Choose which column to group the bars by, so by project sub items by parent, this is all looking good. I think we still have the labels for sub items. Okay, now we’re showing the sub items of these. But maybe if you have this unified view, maybe you don’t need to see the sub items. Maybe we can squeeze it in a little bit. Okay. So this is this. Okay, so that was our grouping. These are labels for some reason we don’t have the labels for project B. Okay, now it’s their view settings. Show group summary. We have the summary. The base indication that’s good show we can skewed but what I want to change is again I want to see the base. There we go. Beautiful. I can drag around. Nice and color by I’ve been here to color. I want it by my boards. And I think that’s it. So here’s just the boards that we selected. And here you can select which groups you’re showing. So we basically want all groups. And here we also want all groups. Okay? So this is only where you set it. So once you finish the setting, you can actually modify how much space you want this to take. Because this is sort of like your dashboard where you can add widgets, widgets and customize their size and appearance and everything else. One thing that I wanted to say is that you can see here, okay, we have it’s split, I mean group by the project, which are defined on their each individual boards. The problem that I see here is that for project B, you can see that all the tasks are pretty much just on the same level, right? You can see here DTP, so this one for Aug. 3 to Aug. 6, that’s I think, for French and Korean. Those are starting earlier, if I’m not mistaken. Where are we, the DTP, Aug. 3 to 6, and this one is August 12. But that information is lost here. Okay, so because I decided here to group by boards, the problem is that there is no level, there’s no second level of grouping.
Andrej Zito
So ideally, what I would like to see is if you can group by boards, which preserves your projects, and then also still group by groups, I can also group by groups, but that only leaves me like this. Okay, that was maybe a little bit anti climatic. But that was the first video in the series. Hopefully you liked it. If you want to see more platforms software that I try to schedule localization projects, be sure to subscribe to our channel. And if you like this one about monday.com, give it at least thumbs up and maybe share with your friends. If you don’t like it, then that’s fine with me because I do enjoy trying out new software new platform. So I will still do at least a couple of episodes with new software and see how, how it goes. Thank you for watching this first episode in this new series and I will hopefully see you in some other video and until then, Cheers. Bye bye.
