Seeking Advice on Rolling Out a New PPM Blueprint in Smartsheet

BKK

Andrée Starå

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/130558/seeking-advice-on-rolling-out-a-new-ppm-blueprint-in-smartsheet

Hi,

I hope you're well and safe!

Can you elaborate?

• Have you already developed the blueprint?
• Do you have another one you're using now?
• What type of advice are you looking for, more specifically?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Bec Sullivan

BKK

Apologies for the confusion earlier – it looks like my original message didn’t post correctly. I’ll provide more context and answer your questions below.

1. Background
   Our organization has been using Smartsheet for several years, but the initial implementation went for maximum governance and tried to meet the needs of all teams, which resulted in a very complex setup. Unfortunately, this complexity led to low user adoption. By the time I joined, the data was often inaccurate, most projects weren’t using even basic reporting, and the executive team wasn’t encouraging the use of Smartsheet, leading many teams to seek out alternative project management tools.

I conducted an analysis of internal stakeholder needs and established the minimum governance requirements for all programs and projects. Based on this, we determined the current blueprint was overly complicated. Key project data like RAG status, % complete, and estimated completion dates were often incorrect due to over-reliance on lookups, and most teams weren’t using the schedule correctly. There had also been no training since its launch, despite the organization having grown significantly.

1. Response to Your Questions

• Yes, we’ve already developed a new blueprint.
• The old blueprint is still in use for "in-flight" projects, but all new projects from 1 September are now using the updated blueprint.
• The specific advice I’m seeking is whether there have been any improvements or methods (such as through Global Update) to efficiently transfer in-flight projects to the new blueprint. My goal is to ensure that their data is collected in the Summary Sheet so I can build accurate portfolio reports.

Brian_Richardson

Transferring projects to a new blueprint is manual and time consuming, but worth it if you're significantly simplifying and changing things around.

Our process for that here, a couple years ago, was:

1. Provision the new project
2. Highlight all rows of the old project and use Copy Row to shift the data to the new project sheet
3. For a schedule sheet specifically, the Predecessors won't copy with the Copy Row step. You need to go back to the original sheet and hand copy the Predecessor cells. You can shift-click to highlight and copy the entire column of cells. However, before you do that, check to ensure that the row number of the first task on the old sheet is the same as the new sheet. If not, adjust the rows on the old sheet to line up with the row numbers on the new sheet. Then copy the predecessors. If you don't do the alignment first, then your copied predecessor numbers will all be pointing to the wrong tasks.
4. Double check any automations from the old sheet that need to be adjusted in the new sheet. Control Center will provision your new template with the automations that you have, but sometimes you may need to adjust a destination sheet pointer, depending on your setup.
5. Use Control Center archive on the old blueprint to archive the older copy for later use. Almost a guarantee someone will think they are missing data, or want to see the updates from pre-copy, so it's good to keep it around.