Collaborative project planning with smartsheet – A brief report

As a technical programme manager of an international project for a mobile network operator I had to manage several dependencies between 6 suppliers and several internal IT units. The exchange of offline MS project files and the manual synchronization need a major effort and can lead to errors. I did a short assessment for web based tools with the team and we selected smartsheet.com.

You have to know: Smartsheet is a cloud based product (SAAS), hosted in USA. 

This presents for some project contexts a no-go criterion (especially by using NDA). For an European project the safe harbor agreement could be accepted for the data privacy:

See: https://www.smartsheet.com/privacy

Project Context

Smartsheet has been used between 2014 and 2015. The project has the following key attributes:

• The project team is distributed in several countries (USA, Europe)
• Several teams have to analyze, develop and deploy software deliverables
• There are more than 500 key milestones
• The milestones have a high dependency level (from solution and timeline view)
• V-Model and agile software methodologies are combined
• The contracts with all suppliers include the corresponding milestones with related penalties in case of delay

Role Concept

Smartsheet allowed us to setup the following access right concept

• The licensed (paying) users are able to create new sheets
• Collaborator users are able to edit or/and view existing sheets
• We have built several groups reflecting he project organization
• In every group at least one licensed user has been assigned
• For every group a dedicated workspace has been created with read/write rights. Other groups can have read rights
• The groups reflected the following project teams:
  • External suppliers (licensed user is still on customer side)
  • internal delivery units on customer side
  • project management team (PMO)

The following governance rules have been realized

• • ever supplier and internal delivery unit has its own dedicated workspace
  • the Cascading of all artefacts is under the governance of the program management

Smartsheet approach

All Smartsheet documents are based on sheet technique. Every document type is a customized sheet. The sheets have several features making them very powerful. Examples:

• • Import / export in excel in MS project format possible
  • web forms allow a GUI based editing of the sheets
  • attaching documents to raws is possible (helpfull to document deliverables)
  • per raw comments and log history is possible (similar to jira issue handling)
  • linking between sheet is simple and powerful (selected attributes can be linked). This is a very useable feature to control dependencies between project plans (similar to MS server mechanism, but much easier!)

Smartsheet provide several templates for several use cases.

How we applied smartsheet

We created several sheets, disturbed and shared between groups / workspaces:

• • project plans, connected via dependencies, cascaded from low level to high level view
  • low level plans have more than 500 key milestones
  • high level plan is fitting to ONE A4 page
  • action points register
  • issue and risk register
  • test inventory register (sim card)
  • report sheet

Benefits

In comparison with MS project server (we used in a different context) we see the following benefits of Smartsheet:

• • up and running from day 0 of the project
  • no extra software or hardware is necessary
  • no costs for our collaborators (> 50 users) with only 3 paying users
  • sharing of sheets with other stakeholders is possible without any account
  •  the dependency between all sub project plans is quite simple and provide in real-time an impact assessment of any delay. Plan scenario assessment can be done easily.