Identifying Department Reasources in a Project Portfolio

wliddick · 12/24/18

Hi,

I am relatively new to Smartsheet. I have built a portfolio of projects for our company. I want to identify what departments are involved in each of the projects in the portfolio. This is just a very high-level listing of departments. While we are not trying to include the amount of work estimated for each department (That will come later), we believe it will be helpful to know which departments are on many projects. it is a good 1st step towards, do we have a potential resource problem.

I was hoping to do this in one column with a dropdown list of departments that would allow me to select multiple departments. To the best of my knowledge, this is not possible. It appears you can only select multiple drop down menu items if you use a Contact list and each contact has an email.

Am I correct? Has anyone else tried to do something like this or have an idea of how I might do it? As an FYI, I have listed each department in a separate column and made each a checkbox. This works, but it adds 70+ columns to the portfolio and makes it very unwieldy. It also makes it much more complicated to consolidate the information, since I need formulas for each column.

Thank you,

Bill

RebSchr · 12/27/18

This would be a great feature to have! I suggest submitting a product enhancement request. The feature that allows multiple contacts is fairly new and I was hoping the dropdown list would have this same ability but it does not.

In order for me to get around this, I created a dropdown list that has multiple combinations of departments. This takes a lot of time to setup, but it has made it easier to manage versus having multiple columns. I always add a drop down list option of "Other" and when someone selects this, I then review/add the necessary combination.

wliddick · 12/27/18

Thanks for the reply. I thought about doing the same, but you are right, it would be very time consuming. I am looking at 35 different departments, so the # of combinations I would have would be unwieldy.

Since it sounds like there is no other option, I will put in an enhancement request, but I have no idea how long, if ever that it will be acted upon. It definitely would be a huge help in portfolio and resource management.

Andrée Starå · 12/30/18

Hi,

Unfortunately, it's not possible at the moment, but it's a great idea!

Please submit an Enhancement Request when you have a moment.

A possible workaround could be to add a contact column and add the departments as contacts instead. You can use whatever email address you'd like because it doesn't need to be confirmed.

Would that work?

Happy Holidays & Happy New Year!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

llambert39581 · 01/02/19

Hi,

We have done something similar in Excel and I have been wanting to enter into Smartsheet but haven't yet. We don't just identify which departments but also their level of involvement (small, medium, large) I'd be interested to know how you are using the information. Are you pulling reports? How are you using the information to make decisions?

Thank you

Lori

wliddick · 01/03/19

Andree,

Thanks for your idea. I did not try a non-confirmed email. It will be nice to get the functionality, but this may be a useable workaround. I'll play around with it.

Best Regards,

Bill

wliddick · 01/03/19

Hi Lori,

I am new to my organization and am taking steps to move towards better resource management. We do need to add more information. Ideally, we will start with departments, then identify roles within departments and then level of involvement. I am taking each as an individual step.

Example: Information Technology is needed on the Project. The role (could be more than one) is Application Development. The effort is 1/2 of an FTE for the duration of the project. I am still thinking about the best way to show effort for this organization, so FTE may not be our final measurement.

At this point I am not pulling reports, but that is the intention. Based on my steps, the 1st level of report I will be able to pull is to show how many projects each department is involved in. The 2nd level will be to do the same, but at a role level. The 3rd will be to see how much project effort is needed for each role. Using FTE, ideally we would be able to estimate something like we need 1.5 FTE of Application Developers for Projects.

We do have a ways to go to get there, but we are headed in the right direction.

Hope this helps.

Bill

Andrée Starå · 01/04/19

Happy to help!

Best,

Andrée

Identifying Department Reasources in a Project Portfolio

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