Quarterly Planning - Looking to improve collecting team responses

James Tontarski

I am in the PMO for a large engineering organization. Currently we have a large portfolio sheet (Control Center Summary sheet) that captures all of the information about each project.

In our quarterly planning process, for each project we have the PM input their scope and select which development teams they need support from in a drop-down. We then have the engineering and team leads look at a report that shows all the project they have been requested to support. Currently we have three columns for a team to input their information (drop-down for commit response, drop-down for t-shirt size effort estimate, and a notes column). The pain point is that because we have ~50 engineering teams, we dedicate ~150 columns for just this information. This definitely overwhelms some of our PMs because they see a massive amount of columns and rows and find it too confusing to interact with.

Our current license provides us access to all of the Smartsheet premium apps (DataShuttle, DataMesh, Control Center, etc.). My first idea is that I would create a new Control Center program and have a new Summary sheet that just captures the minimum amount of information about the projects. Then I would create a separate sheet that would hold all of the impacted teams columns and data shuttle / mesh the information to that input sheet. However, I really don't like the idea of using all of those columns and would like to see if anyone has input on a different approach.

Thanks!

Paul Newcome

Are you able to provide some screenshots for context?

Are you wanting to essentially consolidate the columns that were used into a single set of columns for the PMs to review after each dept has entered their info?

James Tontarski

Hi Paul,

Uploading some screenshots:

• We ask the PM of each project to input their project's scope and tag what teams they need support from

• Each of the impacted teams has a report that allows them to view all of the projects they were tagged. In these reports, it exposes columns to capture their response:

Each team has these 3 columns, and since we have about 50 teams, there's 150 columns worth of "real-estate" used for this effort.

My most likely solution is going to be reusing this system in a completely separate sheet and use DataShuttle to bring over stuff like the project name, background, etc. That way the original project sheet is more streamlined.

I was wondering if anyone had a better method to collect the commitment responses, but I am unsure if there's anything better.

Paul Newcome

Really this method is fine for data collection and even recommended. I understand it is a lot of columns, but if each department is only seeing their own columns, why do you want to shrink down the sheet all of these columns are on? Is it because the PMs have to then scroll across all of these columns to locate certain pieces of data for the teams they selected?

James Tontarski

Hmm that's what I was figuring. That was one factor for me rethinking this - have heard from PM's that the current summary sheet is hard to read with all those columns.

As I said above, I think I'll head in the direction of having one main summary sheet for all the projects and set up a Data Shuttle to another sheet for quarterly scope collection and commitment gathering and point the reports to read from there.

Paul Newcome

It is possible to insert a couple more columns that use formulas to consolidate all of those extra columns into single cells as opposed to having to scroll.