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.