Best Practices/Work Arounds for the lack of "elapsed" and "months" options

Carly Chaput

I want to open the discussion in this industry forum because I'm certain this would be a group of folks that regularly encounter this short coming.

The inability to put "edays" in the predecessors column leads me to a ton of extra rows that serve no purpose other than being a way to get "# edays" in the duration column so that my timelines are correctly aligned to reality.

The second short coming is the inability to use "months" as an option in duration or predecessors. Healthcare projects are often times many years long, and no one "thinks in weeks" when you're talking about a multi-year time frame. When I build out a clinical trial timeline and I am given enrollment estimates of "19 months/32 months/17months" etc., it drives me nuts that the best way to handle this is to pull up a calculator and do 19*4.5 and then have to enter "85 weeks" as the duration, and then in the comments column I add "85 weeks = 19 months" so that folks don't need to do the math backwards when they want to reference it.

Does anyone have better solutions to these two gaps in Smartsheet's project building ability? They're both major sticking points for adoption by a couple of our clinical trial managers and I am constantly hoping "todays the day" that Smartsheet rolls out updates to handle these things.