Improving the context of answers to community questions

Richard Rymill SBP

Hi all, can I suggest that as there are lots of new users to the community since it was launched only a few months ago, that existing and new members add a little detail about themselves?

That extra info should make it easier to see the context in which a question is being framed, so the answer is more appropriate? 

Difficult to relate to people when all you have is a name or a nickname to go by? 

Great community and some really interesting questions and answers coming through which hopefully help us all to utilise some of the solutions suggested. ... Givers Gain! 

Regards RichardR

 

 

Stewart Grinton

My name is Stewart Grinton and I work for Palmetto Health in Columbia South Carolina. We're a large hospital system and I'm a video producer for the in-house media department.

 

I've only been here 9 months but have already identified our need to be more organized with project management. Our marketing department uses the rather burly Infowitt to manage project requests but that is a little overkill for our needs (not to mention expensive). Our area has only 9 team members but we needed something more than just Excel spreadsheets and Word docs to share our activities and keep track of what was being worked on when and by whom.

 

I looked at a number of digital assett management systems and came across Smartsheet in my search. I really think it is just the right mix for our purpose. I can now send requestors a Webform that populates data fields with all the information I need to track a video production.  Our AV coordinator can track installation and upgrades of classrooms and our photography coordinator can do the same with her projects. Our weekly staff meetings can be experienced with a live document which we can update and modify in real time. I'm still brainstorming a way to implement a sheet for AV equipment checkout which we are also responsible for. This would include a database of all our production gear that is out on a shoot and would be unavailable for use by another team member. I'd like for it to be something we could schedule people for into the future. Anyway...

 

I think Smartsheet might be the silver bullet we've been in search of for keeping us efficient in our workflow. and this community forum has already been a big help!

Stewart Grinton

Wow this post really took off didn't it Richard?

Richard Rymill SBP

Indeed Stewart. 

Just reading through your needs again. Have you tried allocating an email address to each piece of Kit and treating them as a resource and booking them our like you would a human for a conference or holiday. We do that with our training rooms.

 

We have seen plenty of efficiencies to be had in the healthcare sector using Smartsheet and plenty more still to be had for those just realising what they are missing. 

Regards

RichardR

 

 

Stewart Grinton

Richard, I've recieved that exact advice from others in a different post but have had trouble wrapping my head around the concept. Answer me this though, in the implementation you are suggesting the email addresses for each kit would be "dummy" addresses that could be anything, correct? They would actually serve no purpose other than validating the resources in Smartsheet as values that could then be portrayed in Gant/calendar views?

 

So for your training rooms do you have a webform available for folks to go in and reserve rooms themselves or do you use it as an internal tracking tool?

Richard Rymill SBP

Stewart, you can certainly do what you describe but it is not what I meant.

By giving a non human resource a dummy email address eg room1@sbp.com as one of your Non Licensed Users, when that resource is booked out in a Resource enabled sheet that eg tracks the utilisation of the training rooms. If one booking overlaps another, a Red man pops up to signify over allocation. Plus that resource allocation can be in several sheets which is why it works well for kit. eg 5 projects may be using this Kit at different times.

Hope that explains?

Regards

RichardR