Calendar View of Project Status Progression

Question

I have been working with a colleague building out a Smartsheet to track the progress of 54 projects she’s working on. None of the projects are time dependent, but each moves through 5 phases during the course of its life-cycle. The name of each project and its status is contained within columns of the Smartsheet.

Her department head is requesting a dashboard showing the progress of the projects by status against a calendar, see example image below. The project names (only 5 are listed) are located on the left, and the

statuses are shown on the right.

Each status is to have a color associated with it, and highlighted against a calendar year showing the time it’s status changed. I’m happy to make adjustments to the Smartsheet. Does anyone have any ideas how I can accomplish this?

seifs4 · Answer

Ultimately, I was hoping to show times on the calendar where a status for each project started and ended, and where the next status started, and ended. And when a project is complete, to display the entire timeline of when each status started and ended.

From the image you displayed, it appears that the Calendar app might work best, but having to increase the level my institution's subscription just isn't a possiblity. I was initially inquiring about a way to assemble a metric sheet to pull data to display on a dashboard. I have looked into the different viewing options; Timeline, Gandtt, Calendar, and it's looking like the Gandtt view is most promising, but it cannot effectively show the start and stop times of previous statuses, as far as I know.

Does anyone else have an idea of how I might be able to show the progression of project statuses on a calendar?

florian.zbinden7 · Answer

hello,

yes indeed the Calendar app is an advanced that can require the Calendar to be published on a dashboard, it's probably better this way. I suggested this one because this is what looks closer to your screenshot.

If you want to stay within the sheet, then you should test out the Gantt and the Timeline views ; this will work too.

BR

Florian

seifs4 · Answer

Hi florian.zbinden7, thanks so much for your quick response! I will definitely look into each.

For clarity, your methods do not requre creating a dashboard at all, correct? I believe you are referring to the different viewing option within a sheet. And when you say "calendar app" is that different than calendar view?

I have a Smartsheet already built out, but I plan to create test sheets to see what looks best. I hadn't even thought about anything other than working within a metric sheet to create a dashboard, this presents different options.

Thank you.