What is the best practice to manage adding features and changes to Smartsheet?

D.Anderson

We are working on adding testing and change management to our Smartsheet instance. What are best practices for managing changes, and having a Dev to Test to Prod style workflow? How are others managing test data and automations that are not in production yet?

We are working to add additional functions to our projects, budgets, reporting, and some additional automations. We are working to ensure that our new enhancements don't impact our ongoing production workspace.

Akblevins

So, this is a tricky one as Smartsheet is always a "Prod" environment.

What we've done - and not sure what type of model you're on (business or enterprise) - is that we have several blueprints for lower environments (dev, test, demo, and stage). Each blueprint for us corresponds to a workspace and we test changes and integrations in those sheets. If there is a change in the global intake sheet, we will add the column/fields as needed but if form facing, we turn it on for only those specific blueprint options.

I've also heard about recreating your solution entirely to test changes, but we felt that avenue (although very secure) was a little clunky to maintain.