Stop Creating a Workspace for Every Project: Introduce Portfolio-Level Workspaces
The new Portfolio capability is a fantastic step toward simplifying project intake, standardization, and portfolio visibility. However, there is one architectural decision that may become a significant barrier for enterprise-scale adoption:
Every project provisions its own workspace. The Portfolio experience helps users create and manage projects from a central location, but the underlying result is still the creation of a separate workspace for every activated project.
While this approach may work well for teams managing dozens of projects, it becomes increasingly difficult when organizations are managing hundreds or thousands of projects.
Why This Doesn't Scale
Imagine an organization with:
- 500+ active projects
- 200-300 project managers
- Multiple portfolio managers
- Frequent team changes
- Annual project archival requirements
Under the current model, organizations end up with potentially thousands of individual workspaces that must be maintained, governed, shared, audited, archived, and inventoried.
Now consider the administrative burden that comes with that scale:
- Workspace ownership management
- User access reviews / Permission updates
- Employee onboarding and offboarding
- Workspace inventories
- Compliance audits / Reporting on workspace utilization
- Archiving completed projects
The Portfolio feature simplifies project creation, but it does not reduce workspace sprawl. In many organizations, the number of workspaces eventually becomes a governance challenge of its own.
Proposed Enhancement
Provide Portfolio administrators with additional provisioning options when configuring a Portfolio.
Portfolio Workspace Model
Create projects within a designated portfolio workspace
This would allow organizations to manage permissions, administration, and governance at the portfolio level rather than the project level, significantly reducing workspace proliferation while still maintaining standardized project structures.
Future Consideration
Introduce a parent-child workspace hierarchy where project workspaces can be organized beneath a portfolio-level workspace with optional permission inheritance. This would provide the benefits of project isolation while reducing administrative complexity.
Why This Matters
As organizations mature their use of Smartsheet, success often leads to growth:
- More projects
- More users
- More portfolios
One concern with the new Portfolio capability is that it appears to overlap with functionality many customers have traditionally relied on Control Center for, including project templating, standardized project creation, and portfolio visibility. Control Center was specifically designed to scale these capabilities across the enterprise.
As a result, some customers may question whether development effort that could have enhanced Control Center's replication, provisioning, and template management capabilities was instead invested in creating a separate Portfolio experience. If Portfolio is intended to complement rather than replace Control Center, it presents an opportunity to solve a different challenge: scalable workspace management.
A portfolio containing 10 projects and a portfolio containing 10,000 projects should not be forced into the same workspace architecture.
Today, both Portfolio and Control Center rely on a workspace-per-project model. While effective for project isolation, that approach does not address the governance and administrative burden associated with managing hundreds or thousands of project workspaces over time. Even in Control Center's two-tier model, projects are ultimately organized within folders that serve as a navigation structure rather than a security boundary, meaning permissions must still be managed at the individual workspace level or sheet level.
If Portfolios are intended to become the future of project management in Smartsheet, they should provide an architecture that scales not just project creation, but also workspace management. If Portfolio is intended to complement rather than replace Control Center, then scalable workspace management would be a compelling opportunity to do exactly that.
