HYPE Enterprise vs. Smartsheet

Well Suited

• Idea Generation campaigns aimed at solving a specific problem. Contributors can be limited to certain groups, or it can be open to the whole organization.
• Open Innovation campaigns aimed at getting solutions from external sources (add-on module required).
• Continuous improvement process specific to functional areas.
• Processing, sorting, evaluating and scoring ideas.

Not Well Suited

• Surveys
• Managing Projects

Incentivized

Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior

Incentivized

• Hype Innovation allows for a full onsite implementation behind a firewall and does not need to communicate to an external server. This is a major advantage for a defense company.
• Hype Innovation is easily configurable by a systems admin with very limited knowledge of the product.
• Product Updates are rolled out quarterly and offered to all clients.
• Hype Innovation has a specific instance of their Hype software platform that is aimed at their clients and improving Hype itself. Feedback from their management is very quick.

Incentivized

• Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
• Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
• For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc

Incentivized

• The concepts and projects module requires an overhaul to be more flexible. This is on their product roadmap.
• The software would benefit from the addition of an MS Exchange integration for receiving idea e-mails.
• Customisation of the layout and possible custom components is challenging.

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.

Incentivized

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.

Incentivized

It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.

After evaluating numerous idea management and innovation management platforms, the main reasons we chose Hype Innovation were:

• On-premises installation (Viima did not allow this);
• Cost (Viima and IdeaDrop had substantially higher costs for the amount of users we required);
• Ease of Configuration (Viima was easiest to configure, but IdeaDrop was a challenge.);
• Customer Service (From initial contact to roll-out was 5 weeks).

Incentivized

Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!

Incentivized

• Longstanding issues with products and services have been made visible to the wider company and many solutions have been identified.
• A common idea management platform has allowed management to gauge the level of employee involvement and cross functional communication.
• Safe storage and archiving of ideas has enabled the company to keep track of inputs over time and refer back to ideas that were not relevant at the time of generation.
• The added workload of managing the innovation platform has meant that more money has had to be spent on the individual responsible for the platform.

Incentivized

• This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos.
• It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months.

Incentivized