The solution is primarily used for project management. I've coordinated a large educational program that has multiple contributors and multiple organizers. It's a weekly program and we use it to outline our curriculum and keep track of the steps in the curriculum. I've used it for my own research projects as well in more of a traditional project management kind of way with tax, people, contingencies, et cetera.
The ability to update in real-time before meetings is great.
The ability to connect documents to builds or whatever that are being worked on or related is helpful.
Multiple people can contribute to it. Instead of the project manager or myself having to collect information from people and then put it in, they can just go in and update their stuff weekly or whatever by themselves.
The initial setup is easy.
At one point we were trying to use it to organize a curriculum for students to just have the weekly stuff. We kind of ran into trouble doing this. It's not really designed for that. What we were trying to do is give them a real-time syllabus with pre-readings and activities and stuff embedded. It ended up getting really complicated.
They also had access, and while there’s probably a way to not give them access, I didn’t know how to set that. I just wanted to let them download. It got complex. It wasn’t just people updating what they were working on. It was something else and it didn’t work.
If there was some way to store more complex files in the system, or if there was a back-end structure where you could store files, that would be ideal. We use Box to store recordings, for example, of sessions and stuff. We’d like to store it in this solution. We already integrate Smartsheet into Teams for updates and stuff. That works well.
I've used the solution for a while. I've used it over the last 12 months at least.
It's very stable. The only time I've had a problem is when somebody has made a mistake in something.
The solution can scale.
We're coordinating multiple speakers sometimes and it works for that.
For us and how we use it, it's also finite. We have eight sessions a week. There's a limitation to how many weeks you do in a year. However, in terms of availability, in terms of people that handle it or multiple people working on it, it would be fine to scale. It's easy to explain that process, whereas Teams is a little bit more difficult. We're always managing more in the past, or on the shared drive and it's geared to that.
I don't know how many people in our organization use the solution since we work in teams. On my team, the Smartsheet that we use for this particular program has probably 12 people dealing with it at any given time. However, there are directors and higher-ups that may look at it just to see where they are. There are likely other people who need to use it as well.
I used technical support once or twice during the initial setup when we first started using it. We loved it so we moved everything to Smartsheet - all our curriculum development items. There are now multiple threads. It actually worked way better than a shared drive.
However, the setup was about two years ago, and as I recall, I was stuck somewhere in the setup. They were helpful. I never thought beyond that. I don't remember being particularly bad or particularly awesome.
We also use Microsoft Teams. It's harder to set up yet has more items we can leverage.
The implementation process is really easy. Comparatively, we use Teams for a lot of things and Teams is a lot harder to set up. That said, they have sharing capabilities, different types of files, and other items as well.
The deployment took a couple of weeks. It's continuously being upgraded since we do a curriculum over the year typically. We don't have speakers or topics sometimes for the end or at the beginning of the curriculum. However, how we use it is really just for project management purposes for our program. Therefore, the initial deployment would be a week or two, depending on schedules. Then we have a team meeting to go through where everyone is on the sessions that they're organizing. It's all so continuous. The session organization is ongoing. That said, there are multiple steps, including an initial phone call with the speaker, curriculum development, readings postings (we use Blackboard to manage our LMS), et cetera.
We organize and it tracks everything from the beginning to the thank you note to the speaker and the evaluation. There are about eight steps and we keep track of them. We have about six people that are involved in organizing the curriculum. They're those product leads and there are maybe six weeks worth of curriculum that is in production at any given time.
We’ve seen an ROI. It’s effective particularly if you have teams that are virtual or located in different places. Just having something web-based, cloud-based, and easily operational, yet looks similar to Excel is useful. It's easier for different levels and understanding that people have of technology. It's not too fancy, however, it has features that give you what you want. When people are not co-located, it's a great solution as everybody can enter their stuff by a certain time in the week. The process is more self-managed so it's not as dependent on the project manager.
I'm sure there's a license involved, however, that's handled through the institution. The institution just pays for their licensees and then they hand it out, and it gets charged to the program. I'm not in finance, and I don't have access to pricing information directly.
I was part of early discussions. We were working virtually. The technology pieces of the program are actually run through a government agency by logging into a VPN. So the team moved to being remote from being 100% on the ground, basically, in the office. We needed a solution that would work for people working for multiple sites or states and not go down. The team was all over the place and they needed something that could be there with them and not go down.
This fit the bill. It's worked really well. If people are out of town, they can update stuff. It's more easily accessible. I don't know if we would've moved to it in the pandemic. We were using a shared drive in Teams and we moved to Teams too during a pandemic.
The web-based piece of it, or the cloud-based piece of it, was a good feature. And then it was just simple. You can set up the sheet and it's dummy-proof in terms of putting stuff in. In contrast, if 12 people put something on an Excel sheet it got messy. I used to spend half a day just cleaning up the sheet and making sure the dates were right.
It did make my life a whole lot easier. You can select and limit how the cells look in Smartsheets. For example, you don't get numbers where you want letters, letters where you want numbers, et cetera. It just made things easier and offered less likelihood of wrong information getting entered. That's why we adopted it.
I cannot say which version of the solution we’re using. I’m not sure.
How I can access the solution depends on which organization I’m working with. I can access it through a VPN or I can access it through web mail.
Compared to even when I use Microsoft Project, for example, which I would probably use for a curriculum thing if you were collecting updates as a project manager, so people would email them, you're going to be chasing them around. Plus, you're entering all the data before you can really do anything with it. This solution is really great in that sense, as everybody has access to it once you set it up and can start entering information themselves. And it's easy to set up, so it's not hard.
For project management, it's just a good solution that's fairly simple to implement. It doesn't require a lot of like upgrades or maintenance from the project manager. For large programs where there are multiple contributors, or multiple people working on different tasks, it's a good solution. It actually makes your work as a project manager a lot easier.
I’d rate the solution nine out of ten. It’s simple to use, easy to set up, and really works for non-co-located environments. In academia you often have people running off to conferences and stuff, even if you are in the office. The ability to have multiple users on the sheet at the same time so they can enter their own information is great.
I’m a customer and end-user.
