Updating projects when parent & child rows are involved

Lily Wang

Hi,

 

I have built a large projects register for my organisation which uses parent rows to express the Project Name, and children rows for each Stage of that project.  So for example Row 1 would be "Park Upgrade". Row 2 would be "Initiation/Planning". Row 3 would be "Design/Development" etc. 

 

Also on the each children row, I have specified the stage's start and finish date.  This rolls up nicely into the parent row's start and finish date.

 

My problem is about working out the best way for the project managers to update the project stages.  I have tried a few scenarios:

 

1) Create a Report.  

Issue 1:  In the report form, the indents separating Parent and Child relationship are lost.  

Issue 2: Unless I share the original project register with "Editor" permission, the project managers can't edit the report. I don't want the 

 

Project Managers to be able to edit the original project register, as this would increase the risk of them accidentally changing another project that isn't theirs. 

 

 

2) Send rows using "Send Update Request" 

 

Issue 1: Due to the Project Stages not being on the same row as the Project Name, they appear as separate 'items' when it is viewed by the Project Manager.  This means that they'll have to click "Next" to see the different stage of the same project.  

 

 

 

At the end of the day, all I want is the ability to find a way for the Project Managers to update projects and their stages which are on different rows.  I'm interested in hearing the experiences of other Smartsheet users.  Have you had similar problems? What did you do to resolve them?

 

Thanks!

 

Auke Anema

Hello Lily and Others,

 

I have the same question as above.

Going to follow this discussion.

 

Regards,

 

Auke

Tim Meeks

I concur. Both of the solutions above have some limitation..

 

One idea may be to give them access to the project as an Editor, but lock the columns you don't want to be updated or changed.   

 

Another idea which requires more work, but would be to create a parent project for just you and a child project sheet for each PM. and have cell links from the child to the parent project.  That may be too complicated but thought I'd suggest.

 

Tim

JohnHinkle

One option is to share the sheet with them, and ask them to set a filter to only show tasks assigned to them. The filter will hide all the rows that do not meet your criteria.