Overall Satisfaction with Smartsheet
Several departments are utilizing Smartsheet within the organization. We are fairly decentralized with several hundred locations making collaboration difficult at times. Smartsheet made project coordination much easier.
I use Smartsheet primarily with my team for many different activities. We track and share time off & out of office information, track and share information on projects, as well as track team member tasks/processes/procedures, to organize and share knowledge documents, and for notices and collaboration across other HR groups.
- Collaboration. Smartsheet makes it very easy to share information with multiple users at the same time. It also has great functionality for sharing with non-users with great options for read-only or allowing those outside users to even edit sheets.
- Project management. Smartsheet has all of the functionality that Microsoft Project does, but is much easier to use. You can import and export Excel, Project, or a few other formats, and the system has multiple options for entering information. Different types of views can be deployed or updated easily.
- Reporting from Smartsheet is very easy. You can take data from multiple different sheets and combine them into one report. Depending on the user access you can also edit information from a report to update the original Smartsheets.
- Gantt Charts: While the functionality here is very good, sometimes there could be some better options with the automatic coloration of these charts. Additionally, exporting is a little limited.
- Formulas: There are a lot of basic formula options but there could be more. Additionally, calculations across multiple sheets could also be improved.
- Pivot tables: These are only available as an additional add-on app. I wish this functionality would be standard.
- It has allowed us to get easily organized and share the progress of projects with the team and some of our internal customers allowing us to deliver information much quicker, and reduce some of the meetings times and back and forth.
- It has allowed us to easily collect process and procedure documentation, and tack updates. Previously we had several hundred documents in many different file folders. This allows us to catalog this information quickly add in additional fields/data points for sorting/details/primary users/additional info. We can easily find and share this information, and overall we are much more efficient.
This product is a great alternative to Microsoft Project, and better in many ways. Easier to use and more flexible. We also use JIRA for IT projects and while I see the similarities. I think for Agile or Waterfall, JIRA may have the edge as it was designed specifically for those purposes. I did notice that Smartsheet has a JIRA plugin but have not used that functionality at this time.