Recommended Smartsheet Automations or Integrations

Hi Smartsheet Community,

I'm working on enhancing the PMO process in Smartsheet and was curious—what are some game-changing automations or integrations you’ve added that made a significant impact? Whether it’s streamlining workflows, improving reporting, or enhancing team collaboration, I’d love to hear your recommendations and success stories!

Thanks in advance for sharing your insights!

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Accepted answers

Darren Mullen

@Chelsea W

This is a fun question to answer, I could write a novel, but I'll try to be brief :D

For PMO one of the most impactful add-ons would be Smartsheet Control Center since this would save you a lot of time in creating projects and linking and rolling up reporting of each individual project at the portfolio level. Smartsheet's own Control Center is a great option. If you don't have access to it or can't get it, there are other options that I could tell you more about.

Going on with the Smartsheet Premium apps, depending on how granular you need to have your viewing and editor permissions, then Smartsheet's Dynamic View or Workapps are a huge benefit.

Smartsheet Bridge is something I like to leverage in more complex builds to manage keeping dropdown columns in sync or to perform reporting across many sheets where using Control Center doesn't quite do the job or is too complex to manage.

Smartsheet DataMesh is one of my new favorites in large builds for taking a report that has data from many sheets and then bringing that data into a sheet for metrics or summarization purposes.

For the Smartsheet developers maintaining your solutions, SSFeatures is a great asset to help with things like managing Conditional Formatting changes from your templates to your exisitng projects.

https://smartsheetguru.com/ssfeatures/

I could go on…. but will stop there for now!

All comments

Darren Mullen

@Chelsea W

This is a fun question to answer, I could write a novel, but I'll try to be brief :D

Going on with the Smartsheet Premium apps, depending on how granular you need to have your viewing and editor permissions, then Smartsheet's Dynamic View or Workapps are a huge benefit.

Smartsheet DataMesh is one of my new favorites in large builds for taking a report that has data from many sheets and then bringing that data into a sheet for metrics or summarization purposes.

For the Smartsheet developers maintaining your solutions, SSFeatures is a great asset to help with things like managing Conditional Formatting changes from your templates to your exisitng projects.

https://smartsheetguru.com/ssfeatures/

I could go on…. but will stop there for now!

prime_nathaniel

Hey Chelsea W

I work specifically on enterprise integrations with Bridge, so I have seen literally hundreds of SaaS use cases out there. Consolidating lead and customer views 360 is a big one for companies, so ensuring the same representation of a customer exists from lead through sale, delivery, and service. The other big ones are financials and time. It is great to have a project status of task burn down it is quite another to have the exact time commits for each task, status, and cost attribution for them. Additionally, this opens the door for other financial analysis relating to projects or operations such as expenses or AR to predict or manage cash flow.

Lindsay Whitbread

Hi @Chelsea W , what a great question!

I'll share my top 3 PMO enhancements, based on the hundreds of organisations I've spoken with.

1. Financial Data integration. Getting the financial data for a project into the PMO so that PMs no longer need to manually track budgets. This means that all project stakeholders have up to date insight into how the budget is tracking the moment that an expense is processed by the finance team.

2. Timesheet integration. Most projects will have labour as the primary cost, so tracking effort estimates vs planned labour vs actual labour (timesheets) is paramount. Smartsheet has a spectacular ability to provide very high quality insight in this regard. Our PMOs are able to provide insights like: "For your Execution phase of your project, you estimated a total cost of $80,000, but based on your project schedule, the project is going to cost you $110,000. You're 50% through the project and have timesheets totalling $45,000, so we forecast that you'll finish this project $10,000 over your budget." What fun!

3. Finally, measuring the user engagement with the actual PMO toolkit. Most Smartsheet customers don't realise that it's possible to build monitoring of the project team's engagement with the project toolkit itself. As you can see in the below screenshot example, for each project you can look at all of the elements of your toolkit and measure how much they are being used. So in the below graphic we can see that the Schedule is being updated fairly actively and the Documents and Risk registers are active, but a lot of the other tools such as the PM Status Update reports are not being used. This is invaluable information to guide change management and training efforts.

I hope that provides some food for thought!

Lindsay

Antonina Smyrnova

Hi!

Great question! PMO processes can definitely benefit from smart automations and integrations. One of the biggest PMO pain points is keeping data synchronized across multiple platforms. If your team is using Google Sheets, Notion, or monday.com alongside Smartsheet, I'd highly recommend resynced.io - a tool we just launched that creates seamless two-way sync between these platforms.

Any updates in your project tracking sheets automatically sync to Smartsheet dashboards and vice versa
No more copy-pasting project status updates between systems
Choose which columns to sync and filter which projects/rows should be included
Stakeholders always see current project data without waiting for manual updates
Status update reminders based on milestone dates
Automated resource conflict alerts
Cross-sheet formulas for portfolio-level metrics
Integration with time tracking tools for accurate project costing

We're continually improving resynced.io based on PMO feedback, so I'd love to hear what specific data sync challenges you're facing in your current setup.

MarjorieP

Hello @Lindsay Whitbread

How were you able to measure how much each item in the PM toolkit is being used? Are you using sheet access report?

Lindsay Whitbread

Hi @Chelsea W, I've been working for five years with organisations that want to step up their PMO capabilities with Smartsheet. Since my last reply I've been asked this question quite a few times and so I thought I'd give you an answer through the lens of software that you can purchase.

I agree with Darren - Smartsheet Control Center, or "SCC" as it's often called, is definitely something that most established PMOs will implement. What we recommend is that even if you have no immediate plans to use SCC, it's important to leave your options open by making sure that your project templates are compatible with SCC. There's a particular way of structuring your sheets so that if you decide to use SCC down the track it will be an easy path.

A strong second place for most valuable addition would be app integration with your finance and time keeping systems. Normally PMs will need to spend quite a bit of time reconciling expenses and labour to track how their budget is going. With properly implemented app connectors and a well designed Smartsheet PMO solution, that work can be completely automated. This brings real time visibility into how the project is performing based on automatically synchronised data from your other business systems.

Thirdly, I'd say that Resource Management, or "RM", would be worth taking a close look at if you'd like to track and forecast how busy the different teams involved in delivery are. RM is tightly integrated with your Smartsheet project plans to avoid needing to separately keep your resource plans up to date. A lot of the organisations we work with will use RM to quickly document a financial justification for hiring resources for projects.

If you'd like more of a conversation about any of this, please feel free to reach out to my team and we can get on a call.

Cheers,
Lindsay

Lindsay Whitbread

Hi @MarjorieP we do this by using Smartsheet automations to track when key changes have happened. It's a very simple and robust process which works well.

To get the chart happening is a bit more involved - a bunch of cross sheet references and reports basically. Please reach out if you'd like help building something like this for yourself.

Cheers,

Lindsay

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