Assigning tasks in Smartsheet for ALL work in an organization

Beth Fantozzi 1

I would love to hear from others who are more experienced than I am about your thoughts on using Smartsheet to assign tasks within an organization.

To set the stage, I've been working with a rapidly growing organization that uses Smartsheet as a key part of their operations. All work is managed in Smartsheet. However, there might be a task that's been assigned to me in Smartsheet but that I'll need to get Sally and Jeff to contribute to before I can mark my task as complete. At the moment, email and Teams messages are being used as a platform to communicate those sub-tasks. Some people are getting overwhelmed and are having a hard time keeping up with their work. So there was an idea to assign all tasks (including these sub-tasks) in Smartsheet. Then reports could be run that would show everything that I'm responsible for (tasks assigned to me in Smartsheet AND tasks assigned to me by others).

We are hoping to poke holes in both solutions (assigning sub-tasks via email vs assigning sub-tasks via Smartsheet) and I'm hoping that someone in this community would have some thoughts to share. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Has anyone solved for this before? Or do you just have a gut feeling about this one way or the other? I'd love to hear it!

Thanks in advance for any light you might be able to shine on this topic :)

Paul Newcome

Assigning all tasks in Smartsheet has the benefit of being able to track who is doing what all in one place and allows for automated emails to be sent.

The only challenge with this is if you have all persons assigned to the task listed in the same cell. Reports can still filter by current user (only need one report that everyone can look at), but they cannot group by a multi-select column. So any metrics such as counts per person would have to be done via formula instead of report grouping/summary.

So really the only "downside" is the pulling metrics becomes slightly more complex, but there are numerous ways to accomplish it all throughout this community.

Beth Fantozzi 1

Thanks for your insight, Paul. I appreciate you taking the time to comment!