Interdependencies Across Sheets: Are they possible to track?

DorothyWasHere

I was discussing the Dependencies tool in Smartsheet with my manager and how it could be utilized to track the Critical Path. Also how we can use Baseline to track any major changes to the project timeline.

While discussing this, he asked if there was a way track interdependencies across different sheets? For example, if John was assigned to work on a task for Project 01 for three weeks and they were then assigned to work on a task for Projects 02 that begins a week after Project 01 begins, is there a way to notify the individual assigning John to Project 02 that he is not available?

As far as I know, the only way to link sheets is through cell reference or automating a row to move/copy. I did some research and found the Resource Management feature. I'm thinking that feature may be the best way to manage this particular example but in other circumstances of Interdependency Analysis, is there a tool or feature within Smartsheet that allows you to track independencies across sheets? If not, are there any best practices you all use when tracking interdependencies for your team's projects?

Brian_Richardson

You have a couple of things happening in your question.

As far as tying two sets of tasks across two sheets together, the best approach for that is to use Cell Links. Create a task in the second sheet that represents the endpoint of a predecessor chain in the first sheet. On that task on the second sheet, right click the Start Date and choose Link from Cell in Another Sheet. Link it to the Finish date of the predecessor task in the first sheet. Repeat with the Duration, linking to the duration of the task in the first sheet.

Smartsheet will now keep that second sheet task updated/synced with the dates from the task in the first sheet. So you've essentially continued the predecessor chain from one sheet to another this way.

It's also always good to turn on change highlighting or setup an automation to notify you when that "cross sheet predecessor" task changes, that way you can tell when something happened on the first sheet, that's impacting your second sheet.

As far as analyzing capacity of resources, that's best done with the Workload Tracking feature recently added to Smartsheet. In both sheets, click the Resource Management panel and enable Workload Tracking. When you do that, the impact to the resources of tasks in both sheets will be combined and displayed. You can expand the display for more details, and it will highlight where people are under-utilized or over-utilized.

Note that Workload Tracking is something you use within the sheet. If you need dashboard-level reporting or more in-depth analysis, you'll want to pony up for the full Resource Management tool which expands the functionality to include roles, rates, organizations, placeholders, and all kinds of custom reporting.