Discovery Sessions Explained: Part 1 (General Questions to Ask)

At OrangeDot, we always remind our customers, 80% of the work happens before implementation. A strong Discovery phase is key to aligning your team by addressing essential aspects such as business processes, goals, challenges, and your organization's future state. While figuring out these details may seem overwhelming, it’s a worthwhile exercise that lays the foundation for your team’s success.

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What is Discovery? A Quick Refresher 

A discovery session is a meeting or series of meetings between key stakeholders who will be actively using monday.com or have a vested interest in how it’s being used by an organization. The goal is to uncover and define goals, challenges, gaps, team roles, business processes, and any other information that can set up the landscape to build accurate workflows in monday.com. 

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Kicking off the Discovery Process:

The Discovery phase is often skipped, rushed, or misunderstood. That’s why we’ve developed this blog series entirely dedicated to making the process easier for you. In this first blog post, we’ll explore some foundational questions we use to help teams navigate through this process. These questions encourage you to zoom out from your day-to-day and assess your team’s operations at a higher level.

Discovery sessions work best as conversations, not just meetings. A two-way dialogue creates an open environment where your team can discuss a wide range of topics, even if there are some challenges to work through. 

You likely will not figure everything out in one session, and that’s okay. The goal is to establish a pace and format that suits your team. Partnering with a monday.com expert like OrangeDot can add structure, objectivity, and focus to your Discovery process.

Key Areas of Focus

We’ve categorized the Discovery questions into two primary areas:

1. General Team Questions: These address how your team operates, the projects you manage, how you execute them, and your overarching goals.

2. Leadership-Specific Questions: Leadership perspectives are crucial, as this group sets the vision, defines organizational goals, and provides insights that may not be apparent to the broader team.
   

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General Team Sample Questions:

• What types of projects do you manage and what types of project management tools are you using today? (Excel, email, note pads, etc)
• What goals do you have for implementing monday.com?
• What types of communication channels do you use? (Slack, email, etc.)
  

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Sample Questions for Leadership

• What KPIs do you want to see from a Leadership perspective? Talk to us about reporting. It can be project, team, financial, performance based, or other.
• Do you and your Leadership team have any specific use for monday.com or will your employees be the ones using it?
• Do you have system governance set up or in plan, or do you want our support?

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These are just a few examples of the strategic questions we explore with teams during the Discovery phase. Partnering with OrangeDot gives you access to a full, customized list of questions tailored to both leadership and team members, ensuring that your Discovery sessions are personalized and impactful.

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What’s Next?

Stay tuned! In the next installment of this series, we’ll dive into integrations and migrations -  key elements of the Discovery phase that require careful planning to ensure a seamless deployment.

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Ready to Start Your Discovery Journey?

At OrangeDot, our experts specialize in crafting smart Discovery plans and facilitating team sessions to assess where your business stands and where you aim to go. Building this alignment is essential for a successful monday.com implementation! Reach out to us today for a free consultation: Contact Us.