Board Limit in a Monday.com PMO
- Echolocity
- Sep 25
- 3 min read
Solving the 20 connected Board Limit in a Monday.com PMO
Echolocity as a Monday.com certified partner and being a work management consultant, we’ve encountered numerous challenges that businesses face when setting up their project management software.
One of the common challenges is that clients have struggled with is the connected board limit in Monday.com. This limitation has been a significant hurdle for organizations aiming to create a robust high-level/low-level project management structure. There are some workarounds available to resolve this issue and some good news coming from Monday.com.
Understanding the connected board limit
Let’s first understand what the connected board limit is and why it poses such a challenge for many Monday.com users. Monday.com offers a column type called “connect board” that allows users to link different boards together, creating relationships between items across multiple boards. This feature is incredibly useful for organizations that need to manage complex projects with multiple layers of tasks and subtasks. Currently, Monday.com imposes a limit on the number of boards that can be connected to a single board.
This limit varies depending on the Monday plan your organization purchases:
Basic Plan: 1 connected board
Standard Plan: 5 connected boards
Pro Plan: 20 connected boards
Enterprise Plan: 60 connected boards
These may feel adequate limits at first glance, they can quickly become a bottleneck for organizations with complex project structures or those looking to implement a comprehensive PMO (Portfolio, Program, Project) solution.
The Monday.com PMO
Clients approach us needing a PMO tiered project management system in Monday.com
Portfolio: This board typically contains overall project & program data, milestones, and key deliverables at the leadership level of reporting and visibility.
Program: Program boards report data at the function or department level, reporting on all projects associated with the specific function/department.
Projects: These boards break down the projects into detailed tasks, subtasks, due dates, status and day-to-day activities.
The PMO is a clear overview of all projects while also allowing teams to dive deep into the specifics of each project. This solution design is particularly beneficial for organizations managing multiple projects simultaneously or those with complex, multi-faceted projects. The connected board limit, however, is a limitation to a PMO solution. Large organizations or those with numerous simultaneous projects can quickly hit this limit. This limitation forces teams to implement a work around with the potential of loss of data granularity and the ability to track status, progress transparency and accountability.
Workarounds
A workaround is to consolidate as much as we can into fewer boards and to use My Work views to segment work. This can be designed as a single “master board” where all the tasks from the various project boards are housed, distinguished by Groups. This way your project board columns are a series of mirrored columns from the master board. You would have identifiers in each row sent to the master board to make it clear what project you are working on. In this scenario the master board reflects overall project status can be connected to the higher-level board by a single board connection.
This can be helpful for assigned task team members to see all their tasks in once place across all projects. From a reporting perspective on dashboards, you are only connecting one board to your dashboard rather than multiple project boards. There are limitations to this approach, but it does get you around the initial board limit issue.
Apps* – there are third party apps available in the marketplace that aggregate data into one board. These apps serve to rollup data allowing a single master board to feed the dashboard. One available app is Rollup Multiple Boards, see Monday.com Marketplace In this app you create new low level (project) boards from the master board using Monday.com templates. The created low-level board is automatically connected to the item in the master board. Make.com app creates automations and integrations as a workaround to create a PMO solution. * (Note: I make no recommendation on available apps)
New from Monday.com
Available in fall 2024 for Enterprise accounts Monday.com is launching mondayDB 2.0.
Version 2.0 is geared toward scale. At the Enterprise level the number of items per board, number of connected items per board and number of items on a dashboard increases to scale larger projects.
Please reach out to us at Echolocity, we can analyze your current project management systems, develops recommendations to fulfill your needs, and create innovative solutions designed to meet your needs.
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