Project Management Best Practice Ideas?

Laura

Good Morning Smartsheet Community!

Does anyone have any best practices / suggestions they could share for multi-project management ideas?

 

We are currently using a Report that pulls rows from the "Assigned To" column across all project sheets in specific workspaces; However, while it serves the purpose, it isnt visually appealing and initially is overwhelming to look at.

My goal is for a SINGLE sheet (or dashboard, open to all ideas) showing all projects assigned to each person but in a more organized layout, not in a "messy" report style format

 

What do you use that works? 

 

Thanks in advance!

rjudenberg

have you tried using resource views?

Laura

Yes, but I'm looking for something more detailed than resource view.

Pam Alakai

Hi Laura, 

Have you tried Cell Linking? Cell linking is useful when you want to consolidate information from multiple sheets. Use cell linking to create a master or roll-up sheet, to keep track of cross-project date dependencies, or simply to ensure that values stay current across a collection of sheets without a lot of re-typing. Learn how to use Cell Linking here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/861579-cell-linking

You can also use Sights. Similar to a dashboard, a Smartsheet Sight™ can help you visualize, summarize, and share important aspects of your work such as project status or whether you're on target with key performance indicators (KPIs). A Sight can also help you stay organized by providing a hub, or central location, for related resources such as collections of sheets or reports. Learn how to use Sights here: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/518547-creating-editing-a-smartsheet-sight

Kind Regards, 

Pam 

Smartsheet Technical Support Specialist 

Kevin Barnes

I run a team of PM's and like Pam mentioned we use both cell linking and Sights.

Sights is VERY high level and we use it only as a cover sheet for our Executive report confirming number of projects and the split between departments.

The cell linking is a lot more useful although you are right that it is not very visually appealing.

We have a master Project Highlight sheet which has all standard information from 'project objective' to 'Sponsor' to 'current status', 'issues', etc. This is also high level so is only one row per project. As much information as possible is linked from the project sheets and then the PM's only need to update the 'highlight summary' and a few other columns every reporting period. 

To make it visually appealing we have added a column for Images and in there have tried to find some relevant/interesting/humorous image that reflects what the project is about.

I then run a report off this master highlight report which takes the image and only the relevant fields that the Executives want to see. Project Name, highlight summary, RAG status, end date and if there are then any issues/decisions to be made by them. That gets it down to a single page width which is easier to present to.

This works although does take some management.

If you just want to see who is assigned to what, then you could take your Assigned to report and add the projects, then you could use the card view based on either project to see who is involved or per person to see what they are doing. You just need to have the information in dropdown form so again here it requires some management as anytime there is a change or new project or person you need to go in and update the dropdowns.

It does work and the view is more appealing, you can also conditional format either projects or people which is a huge advantage. 

Hope this is helpful.