One of the major internal projects we tackled this year was switching project management systems. The system we had been using for fifteen years had taken us as far as it could go. The growing number of users, clients and projects required something more robust. After much research and some debate, we’ve settled on Monday.com.

This article isn’t a “sell piece” for the software. It’s meant to share some learnings that came out of transitioning a moderate size team, collectively, to something new. 

You’re not going to get it right the first time.

That’s ok. Even with being focused on trying to catch everything by the first month’s end, it was apparent we still missed some things.

Training could have happened earlier.

With so few people familiar with the program, you can never prepare enough.

That leads to my next point – communicate.

Communicate. Communicate. One area we excelled at was laying out timelines and expectations for the team. 

Involve users in the process.

Although primarily a project management tool, Monday.com is used by our designers and by accounting for invoicing. Everyone needs to get access to the info that they require.

Plan for hiccups. Expect the unexpected.

We were fully operational during the switchover so we were hyper vigilant early on about things that might get lost in translation.

Five months in, we are now working at implementing the last few changes to get “Dynamo,” as we call it, to where we want it to be. 

Endless patience, persistent support and encouragement will get your team where you need them to be when navigating change. When the reason for the change is clear — more transparency to work details, workload, etc. —, it will benefit the entire team, and it makes for a smoother transition. You can never communicate the “why” of a project enough. In this case, the positive impact was almost immediate. 

Were your experience(s) similar? What did we miss? I look forward to hearing from you.