How to Build a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in monday.com — The Right Way
monday.com has a WBS template. It looks great in screenshots. Here's why it falls apart on real projects — and how to actually make it work.
What a Real WBS Looks Like
A Work Breakdown Structure is a hierarchical decomposition of a project into progressively smaller components. At the top you have the project. Below that, phases or deliverables. Below those, work packages. Below those, individual tasks. In formal project management terms you might go four or five levels deep before you hit the actual work.
The key word is hierarchical. Every node has a parent. Progress rolls up. Completion at the leaf level drives status at the branch level, which drives status at the root. That's how a WBS is supposed to work.
What monday.com's WBS Template Actually Is
monday.com's WBS template is a board with groups. Each group represents a phase. Items inside the group represent work packages or tasks. Sub-items hang below items. That's two levels of real hierarchy — item and sub-item — with groups used as a visual separator rather than a structural parent.
For a simple project, this is fine. But it's not a WBS. Groups aren't tasks — you can't assign them, track their status, or roll up their completion. And before the 2024 multi-level subitem update, you had exactly one level of nesting. Even now with four levels, the structural problems run deeper.
Where It Breaks Down
No rollup progress
In a proper WBS, checking off all child tasks should automatically advance the parent. monday.com doesn't do this natively. You'd need complex automation chains to approximate it — and they break when you go more than two levels deep.
Reporting ignores the hierarchy
Dashboard charts and widgets treat items and sub-items as separate data sets. There's no single widget that shows "percentage complete across all levels of this branch." You end up building multiple widgets and mentally combining them — which defeats the purpose of a dashboard.
Connected boards workaround is brittle
The common workaround for deep hierarchies is to use connected boards — one board per level, linked with connect column relationships. This technically works but creates a maintenance nightmare: updates don't cascade, permissions must be managed per board, and new team members spend their first week just figuring out where things live.
No tree visualisation
A WBS is fundamentally a visual tool. Project managers use it to communicate scope to stakeholders. monday.com has no native tree view — you can't expand and collapse the full hierarchy in a single, presentable view. You're stuck showing stakeholders a list of boards, which communicates nothing about the project structure.
A Better Approach
If you're committed to monday.com, the cleanest solution is to layer a dedicated hierarchy app on top of it. TaskTree was built specifically for this use case — it adds proper tree-based task structure to your monday.com boards, with rollup visibility and a navigable hierarchy view that you can actually show to stakeholders.
The alternative — using a standalone WBS tool and syncing it to monday.com — creates data duplication and sync drift. Keeping everything inside monday.com, with a purpose-built hierarchy layer, keeps your single source of truth intact.
Step-by-Step: Building Your WBS in monday.com + TaskTree
- 1.Create a board for your project. Use groups sparingly — only for genuinely parallel tracks, not for hierarchy levels.
- 2.Use items for your top-level deliverables (e.g. "Design," "Development," "Testing").
- 3.Use TaskTree to nest work packages and tasks beneath each deliverable — as many levels as your project requires.
- 4.Enable rollup so that parent completion percentage updates automatically as children are checked off.
- 5.Use the tree view to present the full WBS to stakeholders — collapsed to deliverable level for executive summaries, expanded for working sessions.
Managing complex project hierarchies on monday.com? Try TaskTree on monday.com →