Productfolio is product management software designed to enable teams to focus on building products. The software gives end-to-end workflow tools to empower teams and to align the workflow. Users can define 'what' and ‘why’ so that the teams can work in the same direction. Productfolio also lets users prioritize opportunities to help create a roadmap. The drag and drop of the visual roadmap will help others know what…
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Smartsheet
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Smartsheet is an online project management and collaboration tool. It includes automated alerts, instantaneous updating and sharing across team members, resource management, nested tasks organized in a hierarchy, a Gantt chart view, exportable and automated reports, and integration with email.
This platform is a product managers dream! If you are meeting with your team a lot for brains storming sessions, this is a great tool as it has an ideas list (my favorite aspect of the platform) where you can write in any ideas you have then task them to certain topics and tag people in the task! You can also move these ideas over to a "to-do's" list and then a "in progress" and "completed" list respectively. This has greatly helped our team take our ideas from just an idea to actually fulfilling it! This may not be helpful if your focuses are only on one idea or topics but this does help you bring your project along with a timeline so you can complete your work in a timely manner!
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
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
I would like to see more color coding options - this is minor but when we have many different projects/clients/tasks, it would help to have more variation for differentiation!
Better price point may help this product get into more offices!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
The similarity of Asana and Productfolio is task management but Productfolio exceeds it tenfolds as there are timeline trackers, to-do list organizers, ideas list, etc. The UI/UX is cleaner on Productfolio and easier to digest which is helpful when training new employees. I would highly recommend Productfolio over Asana!
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!
