Best Practices for Scalable Sheet Templates in Exec-Level Project Portfolio Reporting

Smartsheet User 5000

Hi Community,

I'm working on building Smartsheet templates that will support executive-level reporting across our project portfolio, and I’d love to hear your best practices and lessons learned.

Specifically, I’m trying to design templates that are scalable, easy to maintain, and dashboard-friendly. Here are a few questions I’m grappling with:

1. Project Numbering:
   Is it best practice to use an Auto Number column to assign a unique project ID? Or is there a better way to manage project identifiers across sheets?
2. Sheet Naming Conventions:
   Should the program name be part of the sheet name? If so, how do you handle cases where:
   • The program name is long?
   • The program name changes over time?
3. Handling Multiple Releases:
   For programs with multiple releases, what’s the best way to structure the sheets and dashboards?
   • Should each release have its own sheet?
   • Or should all releases be tracked in a single program sheet?
   • How do you roll up multiple releases under one program in a dashboard?
4. Scalability:
   What practices have you found to be most scalable when managing a growing portfolio of projects and programs?

Any insights, examples, or templates you can share would be greatly appreciated!

Javed Hassan

My personal experience below:

1. I love auto-numbering for projects in a portfolio. If you have multiple portfolios, you can indicate the portfolio with the prefix of the auto-number. e.g. PROJ-0001
2. Presuming you're talking about project sheets, we generally shorten the name to something easy to locate - what is 'searchable'. If it's a recurring project, such as annual system upgrades, we tack on the year and/or quarter.
3. This depends on the size of the release and whether you use waterfall, hybrid, or agile. If they're smaller projects with multiple releases, one sheet works with the right hierarchy (parent/child relationships). If it's a larger project each time, having separate sheets is easier to manage and use. Using reports to filter off completed tasks can be one way to find the happy medium. I would also say it depends on whether the releases are being done internally or by a third party; i typically like a separate sheet each time for third-party releases to make sure it's only shared with the right people.
4. Get it right the first time. You don't want to have to go back to your portfolio sheet or project templates once you've launched. Taking the time to define your KPIs early and ensure you capture the data to support those KPIs becomes really important. If you build it right from the start, the portfolio can 'run itself'.