How to set up monday.com project phases for an architecture firm

Step 1 Decide: one board per project, or one board for everything

Decide this first, because it's the expensive one to reverse. One board for everything is tempting because it's one list, but the numbers break it. With its submittal path, a project board copied from the template holds 49 to 64 tasks. Across 200 projects that's 10,000 to 13,000 rows on one board, slow to open and impossible to read by eye. It also puts the tasks on monday.com's only subitem level (rows nested under a row), leaving no room for corrections, clearance lines and consultant comments.

Go to a board per project once you run more than ten live projects or task lists over 15 lines. With a handful of live projects and short checklists, one board with a group per project works until it hurts. Either way, add an overview board with one row per project (number, stage, design phase, jurisdiction, lead, client, next action). It's the studio's project list, and each row links to that project's board.

Step 2 Make the phases the groups

Each phase becomes a group, a labeled section of the board. Number them so they sort and nobody argues about order. The six groups are 1 Pre-Design, 2 Schematic Design, 3 Design Development, 4 Construction Documents and Plan Check, 5 Construction Administration and 6 Closeout. That's the SD, DD, CD, CA sequence architects already use, so the board reads the way the office talks.

Between DD and CA, add a group for each jurisdiction's submittal path, named rather than numbered because these come and go per project. In the Los Angeles template, City of Los Angeles jobs get LA Planning (if required), LA B+S Submittal and LA Clearances. County jobs get LA County / Santa Clarita Clearances; Ventura, Thousand Oaks, Agoura and Malibu jobs get HOA Submission, Planning Submission and Permit Submittal. A single Other CA Submittal group covers the rest. That makes 14 groups and 99 tasks on the template.

Use the studio's own task names, from wherever its template lives: Asana, a Word checklist or the principal's head. Those are the words staff recognize. The Los Angeles template's 99 task names came word for word from Asana templates the studio wrote and never managed to use. Rename them in a consultant's vocabulary and the board feels like someone else's.

Step 3 Set the columns

Tasks get five columns: status, owner, timeline, time tracking and notes. Subitems get the same status plus a waiting-on column with four values: us, city or agency, client and consultant. Stop there. Every extra column is one nobody fills in, and twelve half-empty columns teach staff to distrust the board.

The status column needs five states: Not Started, In Progress, Done, Blocked and N/A. Most templates leave out N/A, yet that one option decides whether the template gets used. A quarter of a real template's tasks are "if applicable": no HOA means no HOA submission, and no nearby hillside means no fuel modification clearance. Without N/A they sit at Not Started forever, so finished projects look 70 percent done and within a month nobody believes the board. That's a big reason the Los Angeles studio's own 40-task Asana templates went unused on all 70 of its projects.

Time tracking is a monday.com Pro column, and it carries over to every board made from the template. Once staff press its button, hours per person per project collect themselves. That's raw material for a payroll export or a utilization view later, and it costs nothing to add now.

Step 4 Put milestones in as gate tasks

Skip the separate milestones board. Put each milestone in the phase it closes, as a task with no duration that someone marks Done when the phase reaches that point. Examples: "Clearance Summary Worksheet received", "Plans submitted to Building and Safety", "All clearances cleared, permit ready" and "Certificate of occupancy issued". The Los Angeles template puts two gate tasks in each clearances group, with the agency headings between them. The first marks the city's worksheet arriving, the second every clearance signed off.

A milestones board is a second record someone has to keep in step with the first. The person doing the work updates the gate task right where they're already working. The Gantt's group summary shows each phase as one bar. The overview's design-phase status (step 6) gives the principal the milestone view across every project.

Step 5 Add the Gantt and Calendar views in the interface

Gantt, Calendar and Kanban views come from the monday.com interface, not its API, so they're the one part you build by hand in the browser. Add a Gantt view grouped by the board's groups and colored by status, so the six phases read as swimlanes. Switch on the today line, the color legend and the group summary, and add a Calendar view beside it. Both views and the template's automations survive duplication, so build them before the first copy and every project board arrives with them.

The Gantt starts empty, and that's correct: dates belong to a real project, so the chart fills in as each project's timelines are set. Leave Done tasks visible, too. A principal asks a Gantt "why did a two-month phase take six", and only the finished work can answer that; hiding Done erases the evidence.

Step 6 Keep the three kinds of phase separate

Architecture firms call three things a phase, and a template that merges them breaks. Task status, on each task, says whether that line of work is started, blocked or done. Design-phase status, on the project's overview row, says where the whole project stands: Pre-Design, Schematic, Design Development, Plan Check/CD, Construction Admin or Closeout. The overview's "in design" and "plan check and permits" views filter on it. A person sets it, not a task count, because a phase with 90 percent of its tasks done can still be open.

Fee phases, the third kind, follow events, not design stages. The Los Angeles studio's real contract had five work stages and three payments. The studio billed 20 percent on execution of the agreement, 50 percent on submittal to Building and Safety and 30 percent at ready to issue. Terms differ per contract, so fees live on a private contracts board and the invoice schedule follows the contract, not the task list. Our guide for architecture firms covers billing by phase; here, just keep fees off the phases template.

Step 7 Save it as a template and copy it for each project

Keep the finished board in a Templates folder, with no real tasks on it. For each new project, duplicate it with its structure, views and automations. Delete the jurisdiction groups that do not apply, as in the table in step 2. Rename the copy to the project number and address, and file it in a folder for the year the project opened. Named that way, the board sorts itself, matches the office's file server and is easy to find for anyone who knows the job.

Every automation on the template carries over to every board made from it. So point any notification at the task's owner before the first copy, or every project board will notify whoever built the template. In the Los Angeles build, we repointed the two template automations first. A button on the overview row then duplicated, pruned, named and filed each new board in one press. By hand it's ten minutes per project: fine at the start, worth automating by the twentieth.

Step 8 Keep the template smaller than your ambition

The Los Angeles studio's real projects in Asana had a median of 19 tasks; the template has 99. The studio kept the full template anyway, since it would rather trim later than find a missing step on a live job. That's defensible, and it's the adoption risk to watch: a template five times longer than the office's real projects is one people stop opening.

Keep a task only if someone will mark it Done or N/A on a real project in the next 90 days. Otherwise it's documentation: move it into the notes of the gate task it supports, still there to read but no longer there to ignore. If the template sits unused for a month after launch, it's too big; cut it rather than train harder.

What stays outside the template