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March 23, 2017

Collaborative Project Planning with Smartsheet

A practical guide to using Smartsheet for collaborative project planning with multiple vendors and internal teams, including role concepts and governance rules.

Wajdi Abdmoulah

Founder

(TU-Munich, 1997). 29 years of experience as a project, program and portfolio manager. Certified as a SAFE Agilist, Project Manager (GPM) and Scrum Master.

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Collaborative Project Planning with Smartsheet

Contents

We have used Smartsheet for one of our projects and in this blog post we have gathered all the information for you to use as a guide for your next project.

1. Introduction

As a technical program manager on an international project for a mobile operator, I had to manage multiple dependencies between 6 vendors and several internal IT departments. The exchange of offline MS Project files and manual synchronization are very time-consuming and can quickly lead to errors. I did a quick evaluation of web-based tools with the team and we chose smartsheet.com.

Smartsheet is a cloud-based product (SAAS) hosted in the USA. This is a no-go criterion for some projects (especially when using NDA). For a European project, the safe harbor agreement for data protection could be accepted.

See: https://www.smartsheet.com/privacy

2. Project context

Smartsheet was deployed between 2014 and 2015. The project has the following main features:

The project team is spread over several countries (USA, Europe)
Multiple teams need to analyze, develop and deploy the software
There are more than 500 important milestones
The milestones have a high degree of dependency (from a solution and timeline perspective)
V-model and agile software methods are combined
The contracts with all suppliers contain the relevant milestones with corresponding contractual penalties in case of delay

3. Role concept

Smartsheet allowed us to set up the following access rights concept:

The licensed (paying) users can create new sheets
Users who collaborate can edit or/and view existing sheets
We have formed several groups that reflect the project organization
Each group has been assigned at least one licensed user
A separate workspace with read/write permissions has been set up for each group

The groups reflect the following project teams:

External suppliers (licensed user is still on customer side)
Internal delivery units on the customer side
Project Management Team (PMO)

Governance rules:

Each supplier and internal delivery unit has its own workspace
The cascading of all artifacts is subject to control by program management

4. The Smartsheet Approach

We created several pages that were shared independently and between groups/workspaces:

Project plans linked by dependencies, cascaded from low-level to high-level view
Low-level plans have more than 500 key milestones
The parent plan fits on ONE A4 page
Action points register
Problem and risk register
Test inventory
Report form

5. Advantages

Compared to MS Project Server, we see the following advantages of Smartsheet:

Operational from day 0 of the project
No additional software or hardware is required
No costs for employees (50+ users) with only 3 paying users
Sharing sheets with other participants is possible without an account
The dependency between all subproject plans is quite simple and provides real-time assessment of the impact of delays

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