Are you a PMO Org and have recently implemented control center?

anabela sarti

Would love to connect. We are a few weeks out from engagement with PS to build out control center for my PMO group and would love to hear from someone who just did this to talk thru their learnings. What did they wish they knew, what are some of the best practices, what efficiencies have they gained, etc.

Nora

I have not implemented Control Center, but I am interested in the same information.

Jason Duryea

The IT PMO that I work in implemented CC back late 2019 and overall the experience has been fantastic. You will need a super user to help maintain the projects and related templates. While CC has Global Updates, we’ve found that very few of our template changes to existing projects could be fully implemented with it. This turns into a quite a bit of manual rinse and repeat changes on all active projects.

Some of things we expected it to do easily were resolved with some pretty creative uses of formulas and helper columns or rows.

Make copies of templates to test changes with, or setup a dummy project, before making mass changes to existing projects or to the template set used with CC. Document the steps needed to make a change before trying repeat them for each project.

kjcrimmins

Hello,

My company's IT-PMO group started the implementation project with Smartsheet a few weeks ago. We may not be farther ahead than you, but happy to share what we're learning.

anabela sarti

We are at the maintain phase now and walked away with tons of learnings. Feeling like "I wish i knew that" for i would have made different choices. A few initial thoughts below, happy to connect with anyone on the learnings if its helpful.

1. We are a business PMO and not a technical PMO so that is hurdle #1. We did have power users which we thought was enough however in the spirit of automating our processes/templates it became technical and complex, not easy to maintain for non-technical folks.
2. Making changes to blueprints: going in we thought control center provide a place where you automate and build your processes allowing you to make the changes you need in one place and they would apply across your solution - not that easy and does not apply to everything. A bit more complex, again needing more of a developer skill set.
3. Time Commitment: For me i would have double the commitment SS original shared needed from my team. There was no way we would have accomplished what we did with the planned for hours. It ended up being a hardship for us because we had full plates to begin with. I would recommend to set aside time to debrief internally with your teams, get alignment and agreement before re-engaging with the weekly SS calls. The challenge here is that often there was not enough time in between meetings for us to meet internally. Make sure you really take a look at the schedule provided and that you have enough working time. This applies to UAT testing as well.
4. Process Workflows: Have your workflows ready to share with the PS team at engagement, what is working, challenges, what you want to improve/automate etc.
5. End user Training: make sure you define your training needs upfront. If you are a technical PMO org you should be fine however for my team, the developer that built the solution did a 2 hour training for my team/the end users. It was a really good Demo with 2 hours of them listening however it was not an end user training delivered by a trainer, with context, connecting the dots to their current process, etc. I have to develop that on my own which i was not prepared for and thought it was included.
6. End User Documentation: step-by-step for their new processes. What we receive was great again for the technical user which explains what everything is and how it was built however they just want to know what steps they need to take to get their job done. Don't get me wrong their documentation was awesome, just need to create a more end user friendly one
7. Working team: would recommend they be power users, be SS & control center certified. This will be helpful to understand how things are built to anticipate workflows, impacts, etc.

We are happy with the end solution and it will automate a ton of what they were doing manually, however there is a HUGE learning curve to maintain it from here and understand all it's plumbing and impacts. I think knowing some of what we learned ahead of time would have been extremely helpful and less stressful.

Allie Alvarez

All - these have been amazing to read and take note of, thank you!