Most enterprise monday.com rollouts don't start as enterprise rollouts. They start with one team, one use case, and a handful of seats. That was true at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where a 15-user pilot for portfolio and project management eventually grew into a 200-license platform spanning research, IT, HR, and physician onboarding.
Here's how OrangeDot helped Columbia turn organic, team-by-team adoption into a repeatable model for scaling monday.com across a large academic medical center.
What We’ll Cover
- About Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s monday.com pilot
- Challenge 1: Team-by-team adoption was outgrowing its own structure
- Challenge 2: The most complex workflows needed independence without losing shared visibility
- How OrangeDot built a repeatable framework for scaling monday.com
- The impact: a 13x expansion and a foundation for an enterprise PMO
About the Client
Columbia University Irving Medical Center had never operated with a formal PMO or enterprise work management platform. Its monday.com journey began with a 15-user pilot designed to support portfolio and project management within a small team.
The pilot quickly gained traction. Super users began bringing additional teams onto the platform, and monday.com started supporting processes ranging from project portfolio management to physician onboarding and strategic planning. As interest expanded across the medical center, Columbia procured 200 licenses and began exploring how the platform could support a much broader range of departments and workflows. The opportunity was no longer simply to introduce monday.com. Columbia needed a strategy for scaling it.
Two Problems Compounding Each Other
Adoption had begun to outgrow the structure around it, and the medical center’s most complex teams needed more than the standard playbook could offer.
Teams were being onboarded individually, often with internal super users designing workflows themselves. That created strong grassroots adoption, but Columbia recognized a team-by-team approach wouldn’t be sustainable as more departments began requesting access.
Each group also had very different needs. Research teams wanted to manage grant submissions and reporting. Other departments were exploring IT and ticketing workflows. The People and Organization Development team was managing project portfolios, while physician onboarding and strategic planning introduced entirely different processes of their own.
Columbia needed a flexible architecture that could give individual teams autonomy while creating enough consistency to support a growing enterprise work management program.
Grassroots adoption got Columbia this far, but without a shared framework, every new department meant reinventing implementation from scratch.
The research teams presented one of the more complex use cases. Proposal Development and Pre-Award frequently supported the same grants but managed different portions of the process. They needed independent workflows without losing visibility into shared information.
Their existing Asana environment had also grown increasingly difficult to report from. Years of added processes and information meant quarterly reporting required significant effort to sift through data and assemble the right metrics.
The same grant could touch two teams’ processes at once, and neither Columbia’s old system nor a purely siloed monday.com setup could capture both halves of the story.
The Solution
OrangeDot partnered with Columbia to establish a more deliberate approach to scaling monday.com across the medical center, one that kept the grassroots energy of the pilot while giving it real structure to grow into.
Discovery, testing, training, and documentation added to the existing model
Rather than continuing with a purely train-the-trainer approach, the engagement introduced structured discovery, implementation support, testing, training, documentation, and ongoing guidance, so Columbia’s internal champions could keep owning the platform while bringing in additional expertise for more complex departmental workflows.
Reporting requirements defined before boards were built
OrangeDot helped the team work backward from its reporting requirements. By identifying the metrics leadership needed for quarterly reporting first, the underlying boards and fields could be structured to consistently capture the information required downstream.
Repeatable standards instead of one template for every team
Instead of forcing every department into a single template, Columbia could establish repeatable implementation standards while still giving research, IT, portfolio management, onboarding, and other teams workflows that reflected how they actually operated.
One standardized form as the entry point for every grant request
For the research teams, OrangeDot worked with stakeholders to design a centralized intake model that could act as the entry point for grant requests. Information captured through the form could be evaluated against department, eligibility, and support criteria, then routed automatically to Proposal Development, Pre-Award, or both.
Independent boards that still stay synchronized
The two teams could maintain separate boards tailored to their individual processes while synchronizing the grant information they shared, giving each department the detail it needed without forcing everyone into one oversized workflow.
The Impact
What began as a 15-seat pilot grew into a 200-license investment in monday.com, representing more than a 13x expansion in licensed capacity. More importantly, Columbia moved from organic, team-by-team adoption toward a more structured model for enterprise work management.
From Grassroots Adoption to a Repeatable Framework
Departments now have a clearer path for determining which workflows can be managed internally and which require deeper implementation support. Internal champions continue facilitating adoption while OrangeDot provides architecture and implementation expertise for the more complicated use cases.
Research Administration Gets Standardized Intake and Connected Reporting
For teams like research administration, the new approach established a framework for replacing increasingly cumbersome Asana processes with standardized intake, connected departmental workflows, and cleaner reporting.
A Foundation for Columbia’s Broader PMO Strategy
The engagement also created a foundation for Columbia’s larger PMO strategy. Instead of treating each new monday.com request as an isolated implementation, the university can now think about governance, adoption, reporting, and workflow design as pieces of a scalable program.
15-seat pilot expanded to 200 licenses · 13x growth in licensed capacity · research, IT, HR, and physician onboarding unified on one platform · a repeatable implementation framework in place of ad hoc, team-by-team rollouts
FAQs
How do you scale monday.com without losing the grassroots adoption that got teams on board in the first place?
Keep internal champions in the loop for the workflows they already run well, and bring in outside implementation support for the use cases complex enough to need dedicated architecture. The goal isn’t to replace train-the-trainer, it’s to add structure around it.
How do you support two teams that work the same process but own different parts of it?
Build one shared intake point, then route submissions into separate downstream boards so each team gets a workflow suited to its own process, while the shared information stays synchronized in both directions.
How do you make sure a growing platform doesn’t turn into an unreportable mess?
Design the underlying boards and fields around the metrics leadership already needs for reporting, rather than building workflows first and trying to extract reporting from them later.
Can a departmental rollout strategy work without forcing every team onto the same template?
Yes. Establish repeatable implementation standards, like naming conventions, governance, and documentation, that every team follows, while letting each department’s actual board structure reflect how it really works.
Final Thoughts
A successful pilot is a good problem to have, until every new team that wants in forces you to reinvent implementation from scratch. Columbia’s 13x expansion worked because the university paired its own grassroots champions with a repeatable framework for structure, reporting, and governance, rather than choosing between the two.
If your organization is trying to scale monday.com adoption beyond a single team or pilot, we can help you build the framework to grow into. Talk to an OrangeDot expert →