How a Monday.com Partner Can Help Your Business Succeed
Introduction
Execution is often plagued by handoff issues, miscommunication, redundant tasks, and a lack of progress despite the team's best efforts. Sound familiar?
Monday.com provides a work management solution with a collaborative visual work hub that eliminates the need for traditional chaotic work management methods, including emails, spreadsheets, and fragmented apps.
However, Monday.com is only as good as its configuration, and that's the advantage of a Monday.com partner.
As a platinum partner with offices in Australia, India, and Singapore, we have the unique advantage of being able to take an in-depth look at businesses using Monday.com and those that do not, and we have attributed the difference to platform implementation.
We are going to outline, in detail, the services a Monday.com partner provides, the importance of these services to Australian businesses, and the criteria for making your selection.
What Is a Monday.com Partner — and Why Does the Tier Matter?
Monday.com has a worldwide partner initiative that certifies consultancies to sell, implement, and provide support for the Monday.com platform. There is a tiered partner structure (Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Enterprise) based on the number of clients, the certifications of the partner, and customer satisfaction.
A Platinum Partner like Upstream brings an integration partner's skillset in much more than licensing. We develop on the platform. We are privy to product updates and are directly engaged with the Monday.com team. This is what is needed when there is advanced automation to troubleshoot and/or there is a need to access product functionality before the general release.
To illustrate an example, some people buy Monday.com without a partner because they could add the program like its a stand-alone accounting application. You could do it, but you are not adding the program the right way, you are not realizing the value, and you are likely to complain about the program when something goes wrong.
The tier is an indication of what level of expertise a partner actually has.
What Does Monday.com Work Management Actually Cover?
Before we address what a partner does, we should clarify what Monday.com work management is, as the platform has expanded and the terminology can make it difficult to understand.
The central product in the suite from Monday.com is Monday.com Work Management. With this product, the vision is to provide teams with the tools that allow full visibility of the team’s work across the entire scope of the projects. The work that the team completes is broken down into tasks, timelines, and the resources needed to complete the work.
Work Management also comes with features that allow:
Monitoring of projects and portfolios
Custom dashboards for reporting and viewing workloads and tasks
Automations to remove repetitive, time-consuming, manual tasks
Tools Integrations (Slack, Gmail, Ms. Teams, HubSpot, Jira)
AI features to create a summary, tasks and suggest improvements to workflows.
Monday.com Work Management is not a CRM. (For CRM, look for Monday.com CRM.)
Monday.com Work Management is not a helpdesk. (For help desk solutions, look for Monday.com Service.)
This product is the junction of your operations. This is the product where the work gets done and tracked.
A good Monday.com partner will help you identify the true needs of your business and which of the suite’s products will best address those needs. They will provide you with this information without the intent of selling you a really expensive solution.
Using a Monday.com Partner to Help Your Business Succeed
1. They Build for How You Actually Work
A lot of the time, the pages set up with the Monday.com default templates are great starting tools for teams. However, teams are not templates, and you need to build custom offerings to serve your teams.
A Platinum Partner will come in and spend some real time understanding your business processes and workflows, and only then proceed to their work in the tool.
Questions they ask include:
How do handoffs or escalations among the teams work?
What does your team really need to work on and see on the page on Monday.com each day?
(No pun intended.)
The most important part of that learning process is what drives real adoption of the tool for your team and prevents the build from serving a use case that it was never designed for.
2. They Use Automation to Save Time
One of the best Monday.com features is the automation engine.
Most businesses don't recognise the value of this feature. Many customers don’t even know the automation engine exists, while others barely use it beyond the basics and use it only for status-change alerts.
These partners know the value of this piece of the platform and the time savings that come from it. They understand the repetitive and time-consuming tasks of:
Updating status
Sending follow-up emails
Creating recurring tasks
Sending notifications to stakeholders
They will do this automation for you.
The savings are in the range of 10 or more hours per week per team, and the return on investment for this is very clear and significant.
3. They Understand People and Change
Understanding the value of people and change is another key factor in the success of the best partners.
They understand that for a platform to be a success, it must be realised and accepted by all.
These partners get involved far beyond configuring a workspace. They help drive the change by:
Providing training
Helping develop your management team into champions for the change
Creating "how-to" guides
Building support documentation
They do the work to ensure that the necessary behaviour changes are achieved.
4. They Connect with Other Tools
The automation and integration features that come with Monday.com have significant time-saving potential.
These features ensure that the platform is customised to your business and seamlessly integrates with your other business systems, be they operational, support, or accounting.
Building integrations that enable clean data transfer and prevent duplicate data or the need for manual adjustments requires technical knowledge surrounding the capabilities of Monday.com.
With custom development possibilities for partnership, Upstream builds integrations that are unavailable as standard offerings.
For Australian businesses that have data handling compliance issues, Upstream builds additional integrations to ensure your setup complies with regulations and to manage the obligations of where your data is stored and how it is transferred.
5. They Adapt With You
Monday.com is a constantly evolving ecosystem.
New features and modules are added along with new AI capabilities and new ways to integrate. Sorting the valuable and actionable changes from the irrelevant ones takes considerable time and effort.
A retained partnership means that you have someone devoted to keeping track of actionable updates.
You'll hear first about any feature or change that impacts your workflow and automations.
The purpose of a retained partner is to ensure that your initial investment is sustainable and provides long-term value.
What to Evaluate When Selecting a Monday.com Partner in Australia
Partnerships within the Monday.com ecosystem are highly disparate.
The most important considerations are:
The partner’s level. A partnership tier of Platinum or higher indicates that the partner is engaged, certified and has accountability to Monday.com.
Being based in Australia. A partner based in Australia will have an understanding of local compliance, the business culture and will be able to attend in-person meetings.
Scope of offering. Do they have the capability to do integrations and custom development, or just basic implementation? Complex businesses require much more than a simple template.
Honesty in exploring options. A reliable partner is not afraid to tell you on Monday. com is less suitable, or that a simple setup is better than a complex setup.
Support after going live. What happens after project completion? Do they provide ongoing retainers and refresher training, or do they leave completely?
Upstream works in Australia, India, and Singapore, so we can work with your teams in different time zones without requiring multiple vendors.
Common Mistakes Businesses Make Without A Partner
We have partnered with many businesses that have attempted to implement Monday.com by themselves and have come to us when it has failed.
The mistakes we notice are extremely similar:
Boards created with no standard naming or structure, making it impossible to create a report.
Automations are conflicting and are created by trial and error.
Workspaces that are internal processes that are hard to deal with and have no user adoption.
No dashboards, meaning leaders have to find someone to pull data for them.
Overcomplicating the tool- too many boards, too many columns, too many views- causes abandonment.
The platform is not to blame for these failures.
These failures of implementation are completely preventable with a good partner.
Is Monday.com Work Management Appropriate for Your Business?
Monday.com is ideal for businesses with a need for more than what can be offered with email and spreadsheets, but has no requirement for a high-level enterprise project management tool that can take months to set up.
Monday.com is designed for:
Professional services to manage multiple client projects
Marketing and creative teams managing multi-channel campaigns
Operations teams managing cross-functional activities
Businesses in construction, trades, and property management have site and compliance flows
Growing SMEs with up to 200+ employees
If you are in any of these areas, Monday.com will work for you, and your focus should be on whether you have the right partner to utilize it effectively.
Want More From Monday.com?
If you are using Monday.com for the first time or if you are using it without the expected benefits, Upstream can assist.
As a platinum partner of Monday.com, we offer our services to businesses throughout Australia to assist in the design, building, and ongoing support of more effective implementations.
→ Reach out to the Upstream team with your Monday.com work management inquiries so we can provide you with an honest assessment.