How can tasks added in Resource Management be coupled to tasks in smartsheet
In RM one can add tasks to an allocation. Is there a way that these tasks can be made visible on the relevant entry in Smartsheet? And is there a way yo control which smartsheet columns are vsible and available to edit in RM?
Answers
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The onboarding video states that the following fields are integrated between Resource Management and Smartsheet;
- Start Date
- End Date
- Duration
- Assigned Resources
- % Allocation.
In practice, I've found that's not the case. It does not send over duration. The issue there being that if you send a task over that is 1.5d duration, at 100% allocation, Resource Management sees this incorrectly as 2d at 100% duration.
Tasks are bi-directional. If you add a task in Smartsheet it goes over to Resource Management, if linked. Adding a task in resource management also copies the task to Smartsheet. All four fields, start date, end date, assignee and allocation, must be complete for the API to send.
You will notice that Status is not one of the fields sent. There's no way at all to changes the fields being sent and no way to configure columns. This is an area that really needs improvement from Smartsheet's side.
We need to be able to configure the statuses shown within Resource Management, choose additional data like %complete or statuses to integrate back to Smartsheet, and we need it to observe the duration. If they did this, 90% of my users would never need to open the Smartsheet app.
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So I guess your answer is really that it cannot be linked. I've browsed the documentation for Resource Management and it just seems like a separate tool than Smartsheet rather than the managers extension I hoped it would be. Note, the tasks I mention are the sub-tasks. In the same way that smartsheet can handle comments in the "bar" on the right, there should have been a separate "bar" in the same was as comments, for sub-tasks or checklist items.
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Agreed. During our sales process we were told things about the integration between Smartsheet and Resource Management that were, quite frankly, not true.
There's no concept of phases, the tasks aren't carried over. All of these things were touted to us as being functionality we could use and I've confirmed with multiple sources that this isn't the case.
At the moment it's fairly basic and I get the feeling that much of this is very new things they're developing. There's clearly a lot of work to do.
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I'd like to see this more as one single tool! I've added a suggestion on how task vs allocations can be done differently. Se link below.
