Smartsheet Reviews

We use Smartsheet to track projects, portfolio activity, and program activity. It also completes dashboards for upper management and team meetings and serves as a clearing house for items we're considering funding. It's mainly used for business operations.

I like the dashboarding feature best, as it lets me assemble a workspace with source sheets, dashboards, and reports simultaneously. The standard reports and worksheets are most useful for team collaboration. People look at dashboards during presentations, but they go to the sheets to update projects, add comments, or make notifications. It's automated, so changes come to me or whoever needs to see them. I can send notifications from specific line items.

The worksheet is key for tracking project progress, though we track it at a higher level rather than detailed work breakdown structures. Subject matter experts say when they'll deliver things, and that's what we track.

We have used Smartsheet for projects and consulting purposes. It has been implemented in various sectors like food manufacturing, meat processing plants, pharmaceutical corporations, and in consulting services with our clients.

Smartsheet has streamlined the process and increased productivity and output with projects. The intuitiveness and user-friendliness of Smartsheet make it preferable over Microsoft Project. 

Automation has improved workflow efficiency as Smartsheet moves quicker and adds necessary features for our needs.

My use cases for Smartsheet always revolve around small to medium-sized projects to define a standard project and assignment, work breakdown structure, and develop a timeline from start to finish.

I've always wanted to use the resourcing feature, but it has been super complicated and never sufficient. The overhead for capacity management has never fully realized enough value.

The dashboards are rather complex and not intuitive, requiring a full custom implementation in order to manage multiple programs. We're going to try and set that up now for this one national project, but from a pure project management perspective, Smartsheet works great as a low-cost replacement for Microsoft Project. I feel it equals and parallels the capabilities of Microsoft Project.

What I appreciate best about Smartsheet is the straight Gantt chart and its flexibility. The user interface is very customizable, allowing for easy segmentation of workstreams and leveling tasks.

Because of this customization, you can tailor your views for rapid project reporting as well. It's really about the user interface and basic project management, making it very fast.

It is my favorite project management tool. The reason for that is that it is very flexible. It is much easier to use than Microsoft Project in terms of creating custom fields. It is very similar to Excel. So, people understand it, which makes it a little bit easier to use for most users. From my experience, most people don't like using Microsoft Project if they need to create any kind of custom column. I was never unable to create the functionality I needed.

It has got a really nice workflow engine. It is helpful if you want to let people know based on a date or criteria. Anytime a new project was submitted to the project intake table, I would get an email. You can also send the email to Slack or a whole host of different types of targets. If a task was due next week, I could have the system send an email that says, "Hey, you've got a task coming up next week," and then, if it was late, I could have it send an email or a Slack message to somebody. That was very helpful.

The main challenge with Smartsheet is that when you start putting components on the Smartsheet dashboard, they don't know about each other. So, if I filter something in one widget, or if I click on a region or a project ID, the other widget or component and the visualization that's on that dashboard don't change. It doesn't know about the other component.

It probably also doesn’t allow you to level resources in a project plan. So, if I assign five tasks to you and they all occur on the same day, in Microsoft Project, I can level them. Because you can only do one thing in a day, it would spread those out over five days, instead of all piled up on a single day, but I don't think Smartsheet had that.

It's mostly for project management, scheduling, and planning.

Smartsheet mainly helps with project planning, maintaining and updating the plan, identifying and documenting risks, and staying on top of the plan.

The only benefit of the solution is collaboration. When I assign tasks, my team members get an email, and they can click on it and update their tasks. Smartsheet’s reporting capabilities help us with capacity planning.

Smartsheet is a really good tool for collaboration. If I put somebody’s name into an assignment, they get an email. They know what they’re being assigned, and they can access it. I don't have to run around chasing people. The emails help in workflow efficiency. In terms of overall planning, capacity consolidation across plans is quite useful, but it takes a lot of effort to get it to work properly. It's not that intelligent, but it's better than Microsoft Project. From a workflow perspective, it's pretty powerful.

Leadership changes occur every two years in my company, which is a public organization. This includes changes in CEOs, directors, leaders, coordinators, and other positions. We need to track strategic cycles, projects, and portfolios with each change. Each project involves a large team collaborating to understand needs and find solutions.

Granting access to Smartsheet is much simpler. Anyone can access it with just a link and password. Smartsheet also offers intelligent forms, allowing us to collect project proposals easily. Before our first meeting, I can review initial project ideas submitted through these forms. Additionally, attaching files is straightforward - no need to navigate through menus. The search function is also nice. 

The Gantt chart is a valuable tool for public organizations. There is a significant emphasis on external control compliance. Therefore, with this feature, you change the content in every cell in the sheet and in the timeline, and you can track and see the day, time, and the person changing the value. Furthermore, you can choose whether to display a PDF or an HTML page. It helps to update documents quickly. The tool is easy to use.