Summary of lacking features
After running a project with multiple sub-projects since june last year, project is preparing/renovation of a eight-floor building for 1300 workers including construction, painting, electrical, lighting, IT, AV, the top three features I have been missing are (no ranking between them):
1. Baseline functionality
2. Ability to lock Milestones/tasks to be aware of shifting dates
3. Possibility to show successors when applying filters.
On the Nice-to-have list would be:
1. Ability to resource balance tasks
On the plus side of things, the over all reaction I have had when opening up/sharing Smartsheet has been that it doesnt look as scary/complex as M$ Project. Many times ive heard "That looks like Excel on speed..."
Since I, like many other users that I have seen here, have a hard time following along the future of Smartsheet development, this is my 5 cents on where the focus ahead should be.
Without those three features above, I do think that I have to revert to M$ Project for my next project to be able to handle things with some control when the sh*t hits the fan.
Comments
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Not sure I know what you mean by Baseline Functionality
For Number 2 I just have an extra row for milestones and lock the entire row.
For number 3 you can include the parent rows, which will show the higher level tasks (added a screenshot of this). Or you can have a helper column that posts a conditional based on information in the sheet so you can filter by the information you want.
For resource balancing tasks you can add an efficiency/effort column, make it be a percent, and use another sheet to reference the project sheets. With this you can see the availability of your resources across all of your projects.
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Sorry for being unclear, with baseline I mean that I want to be able to take a snapshot of the plan as a baseline and then from that see how things are progressing in reality. I have read about different work arounds for this but none of them is a viable way of doing it in larger projects
Did a quick test of your suggestion regarding locking row with milestone and I can still get that milestone to shift dates by changing a successor without warnings. Maybe I am missing some setting?
I do include parent rows in my filtering but that still hides things that are filtered out (as it should in the filter world) and without the successor information it is hard to track dependencies in this view.
The nice-to-have point of resource balancing was also unclear from my part. What I was refering to as nice-to-have is the possibility to balance duration of a task by adding or removing resources to it.
