PORTFOLIO AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN SMARTSHEET
Smartsheet is excellent for project and portfolio management. We say this with over 20 years experience delivering projects of all sizes for blue-chip organisations such as Cadbury, GlaxoSmithKline, Costa and Coca-Cola at a local, regional and global level, and having worked with a multitude of suppliers and agencies.
The success of projects is heavily dependent on how effectively the project team works together and how they keep each others and stakeholders informed on progress and challenges. Therefore collaboration and access to accurate information is critical.
In our view, Smartsheet is an absolute game-changer when it comes to being able to manage projects more effectively. No more issues with the project manager being the only person able to view the plan in MS Project as no-one else has a licence, or projects being management in Excel where activities are not linked and rudimentary work-arounds are set up to create Gantt charts.
Smartsheet enables teams to create and collaborate on projects seamlessly - and allows the team to view the project as a Gantt chart, a spreadsheet, a calendar view or as Kanban cards in lanes. Powerful workflows can be set up quickly and easily to send notifications and alerts, or manage approvals, and relevant documents can be uploaded to each line item, as can proofs for stakeholders to provide feedback on and approve. Project discussions can be held at an activity or project level so there's a full record.
The project team can add in whatever fields and metrics they need quickly and easily and set up reports to access the exact information they need - no longer restricted to the fields the software has preconfigured and not big costs or delays to implement. Equally, the project documents can be locked down to prevent any new fields being added.
In our view, more importantly, Smartsheet allows for any associated project documentation to be connected, either attached directly as a file, or to interface with the relevant project data. So not only can the project managers have all their information in one place (RAID log, actions, comms plan, etc), all other relevant documents can be linked, eg financials, product formulation sheets, business requirements documents, etc.
Click on the links below for an example of a portfolio and project dashboard - and when inside, click around to see the associated documents. There are just demos - these dashboards and all the underlying assets can be quickly set up however the project teams / PMOs require
A project and portfolio template set can be set up and modified easily, and then new projects can quickly be added using a template and inheriting all the same reports, dashboard and portfolio reporting rules. There is a small amount (and we mean small, eg 30 minutes max) of manual set-up required when creating a new project.
For organisations managing a large portfolio of projects, we recommend using Smartsheet Control Center, which enables a project blueprint to be managed centrally and new projects to be set up with very little intervention. More importantly, the Control Center allows bulk changes to be made to all projects if there is a need to update, add or change a field, for example.
Need any more convincing? Have a look at what Roche have been able to achieve using Smartsheet:
"We’re actually managing 30% more projects with the same number of project managers as we were before we implemented Smartsheet."
Michael Ghrist, IT Account Manager for Commercial Operations