Adding Team members column to intake and/or metadata and/or plan...

Silvano Meffe

Hello, I have a general design question.

I have built a comprehensive solution for our organization for portfolio project management that we are piloting covering more than 15 locations.

One thing I did not add, and I am debating as I am building WorkApps functionality into solution, is a field for a list of team members. For whatever reason, I personally cannot seem to come up with a logical reason to add this as a separate item, given that tasks and CRAID log items will be assigned to individuals anyway, and we are not tracking time/effort allocation for resources, and likely never will (i.e. nothing from resources perspective).

Am I missing something with regards to the benefits or added capabilities/functionality provided by having this additional field?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Silvano

jessica.smith

@Silvano Meffe

I'm in the CDMO Pharma industry. We use Smartsheet to manage execution of our contracts. We have a lot of active contracts at once and assign a project manager to each during intake. We will assign other key personnel (e.g., which manager is going to be responsible for Manufacturing) as well so they can see the same benefits as the Project Manager, but we definitly don't try to assign the full team during intake. Our project teams can become very large and change a lot as our projects are executed, so I don't think this would even be feasible. We are able to get all functionality we need for the rest of the project team by just assigning them work on the project plans and leveraging reports.

It's unclear from your post if your are currently assigning at least one key contact for the project (like a PM) during intake or if the question is specific to identifying ALL team members, so just want to speak a bit to the advantages of assigning a PM (and/or other Key Project Personnel during intake).

1. Anyone listed in a contact field during intake can filter the list of projects for their own active projects and basically have a direct link to each workspace which can be convenient
2. In your blueprint In the control center you can assign special elevated permissions to any contacts identified during intake. So for example, I can set up the blueprint to make whoever is entered into the Project Manager field an admin on the Project Workspace when the workspace is created.
3. I can pull the Project Manager into any of the workspace sheets as Profile Data and then use an Index(Match) column formula to associate the Project Manager with every row on the Project Plan (or other sheet) without a cross-sheet reference. This way I can filter all of my rows on all of my projets by a given Project Manager (or Project Manager equals Current User) to provide a PM with complete visibility to work that needs attentional on all active contracts from a single report.
4. The full project team has very clear visibility to know who is managing which contracts so they know who to go to
5. Allows easy generation of metrics related to PM workload, and overall project performance for a given PM, etc

I'm sure there are other advantages as well that I'm not thinking of, but I think this is good for now. Interested in hearing if others have a use-case for trying to assign full project team during intake as well.

Silvano Meffe

Thank you so much for the detailed response. I should have been clearer, yes I do have the PM as a contact as well as the location/department manager and a backup. I was just curious about having the rest of the team in another column.

Thinking of WorkApps and Control Center, I guess one benefit would be team members would automatically be assigned their role for work app and that would be an easier way to control what they can see and update versus what they cannot of should not.