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.

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.

Smartsheet is used for secure team collaboration, whether with global or with cross-functional teams. It's a good solution for a PMO, even for marketing strategies, IT tech dashboards for ticketing, etc.

My scope was mostly learning Smartsheet for the first few months, which was the hardest part because it's a huge learning curve. There's not a lot of documentation, and their training was extremely general because it's your solution you're building. It was not like Excel where if somebody runs into a problem or has hit an error or has had an issue, they could quickly look it up and find some community support. The Smartsheet community is very good, but they're also still new, so trying to find advanced solutions to have to work around within Smartsheet was the hardest part. It became, instead of an eight-hour job, more like between sixteen to twenty hours of work to get the full solution done. 

The thing about the emerging technology team that I worked with at Verizon using Smartsheet was that the team thought it was like Excel on steroids. That's the idea that everybody keeps thinking, that it's an out-of-the-box experience and that it's going to be the solution that they need. You have to apply full rules and functionality the way that you need to from the very beginning, you need to know what you want, have everything set up the way that you want it to be set up, and designed the way you want it to be designed, and customized before you ever produce. Because once you get started in Smartsheet, people just don't stop, so making sure you add that baseline of everything that you want it to be and understand its capacity, scalability, and true functionality, it's an extreme sport, I can tell you that for sure.

What I found most valuable in Smartsheet is its project customization feature. It's a great solution because you can add in your own WBS. You can see it in Jira style, Kanban, and you can even do Agile and Waterfall. 

Another feature that's valuable in the solution is when you have those connections, you have that API, you have a sandbox, and you can make a solution, it's a tremendous product because you can pull data.

Smartsheet tries to enforce people to use their Control Center which costs $20,000, but what's good about that module is that it allows you to also create some cool solutions that even the Smartsheet team didn't know. In the end, I had a check done by Smartsheet on our system and they said, "You recreated Control Center, and we don't know how you did this, but it's insane." They were extremely shocked. They could only offer a dynamic view, which I think is what they wanted to try and push, but that would entail sleepless nights.

Smartsheet pushes out weekly updates because it's still new, and its team is trying to make it a nice product even for people that want to use it out-of-the-box for their enterprise solution, and this could be another pro in the solution.

I haven't seen anything like Smartsheet before. It is great and it is an amazing solution. It allows cross-functional global communications with offshore teams, and this means those teams can do the work, put in all that's needed and what's been done, have scrum meetings, and have all the data and documentation attached to row-level. If the teams do use AI, the data can be corrected, updated, and sent back. You can pull the data out, put it into a Data Lake or Hadoop, or any kind of SQL, or Oracle, or whatever data system that you have, and you can streamline it out of the system just like you can with Excel.

Smartsheet is a great product if you know how to use it right. The free version allows you to use the basic Smartsheet abilities, then for the enterprise edition, there's a lot more you can work on and do with it.

Smartsheet is very secure. It's really impressive if you can use it right and you can train your team.

I am using the core Smartsheet product right now and one of their premium add-ons called Resource Management. It was previously called 10,000ft, but they rebranded it. We're launching various programs at this university, and each project has a lot of steps. We need to highlight the essential metrics that executives want to monitor and talk about at their meetings when they discuss the program launch status.

We built a dashboard in Smartsheet that pulls data from 50 different projects and highlights things like program launch dates, marketing launch dates, past-due items, at-risk items, etc. I have a module for revisions to existing programs. This dashboard feature sold us on the core product, and it's where we get the most value

Smartsheet has help us scale our organization past Excel sheets. We were manually updating cells upon cells of information in Excel and no one had a clear picture of what was happening with projects in real time. Smartsheet changed that.

Information for projects was fluid and the automations and alerts were able to keep key stakeholders aware of pertinent information at the click of a button. With Smartsheet, we are able to focus on the "why" behind our project data. We are able look at our dashboards and see the big picture.

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. 

We're using Smartsheet at the enterprise level throughout the organization. We did a test at the corporate office before moving forward. In the beginning, we were only using Smartsheet to help our corporate users open new facilities and convert warehouse management systems. Also, we used it in implementation at sites with new customers. Eventually, we began using Smartsheet for entire projects. We transitioned from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet for all of our projects.

I'm consulting with a company that uses Microsoft Project, which isn't cloud-based. Smartsheet is cloud-based, so it's more accessible. We need not worry about saving versions of the file when someone makes changes. For example, Microsoft Project locked up while someone was saving a file, and we couldn't access the original file properly. 

Smartsheet offers more than Project because it's similar to a table-based, database-type system. It's like a hybrid between Excel and project software. We were able to enter the formulas and do much of the automation. We added budgets to it and linked them to a vendor page. Smartsheet let us integrate the budget into the project seamlessly. With Project, we needed to open up Excel. 

I'm working around the project management delivery. Most of the use cases center around project management - planning, action items, decisions, issues, or rate logs, plans, and sometimes forms to collect information, however, not as much.

The ability to have users without a license has helped us a lot. Meaning if I'm working on a project with a certain amount of team members, the next time I'm working on another project with other stakeholders, the ability to have them access all the resources based only on my license was pretty cool and made it easy to use, meaning even creating a template, it allows others use it. In my case, there are not as many creators, just users. It was very useful compared to anything else that we had, any other solutions that we had.