Smartsheet Project and Information Management System review

9Expert Score

Smartsheet Project & Information Management Solutions Help to Connect Teams and Work Collaboratively

Smartsheet delivers a large, secure and scalable work management solution with an emphasis on project managers. The interface uses a forms and sheets view by default, compared to task list view of Asana. With a long history in the market, Smartsheet have gained a large range of certifications that meet the requirements of finance, healthcare and government agencies. Great when your data is required to have the up most security and encryption levels. Smartsheet have also gone through the FedRAMP process from US Government which ticks another mark in their software maturity level. The use of templates can assist in setting up your Smartsheet account, yet compared to Asana or Monday.com you may find the set up process a little slower or complex. Read on to see the info the team here at Total Software Info have found for Smartsheet.

PROS

Once set up, easily collaborate within a range of teams both internal and external
Good quality support from Smartsheet directly and the strong partner network
Project Management standards are top notch and support approaches like PMBOK, Prince2 and Agile with supported views that PM and PMO love
Smartsheet Solution Center has a wealth of templates to get your started
Use of free accounts can increase stakeholder engagement and accountability, perfect when scheduling work between multiple stakeholders such as marketing, construction and government
Automate Routines and schedules are great for the detailed task monitor
Users familiar with Excel and sheets will find Smartsheet natural to use

CONS

Can be overly complex for basic users
Requires full range of license to utilise all features
If you haven't worked with sheets lke Excel before, this will be a little difficult

Smartsheet Quick Info

What is Smartsheet?

A complex and detailed Work Management solution. With a bit of training, your projects and tasks will be humming along!

Smartsheet Project Management

Smartsheet is a mature no-code platform that with a bit of training and time spent, you will quickly be able to set up dynamic sheets to manage task lists, assign actions to a wide range of team members and set up dashboards to view and track the work assigned.

The Smartsheet interface is well suited to project and program managers who require detailed information and project management tailored experiences. This is showcased by the view system within Smartsheet that has pre-set views for Grid, Gantt, Card and Calendar.

Compared to other work management solutions Asana, we feel that users will have a bit of a learning curve to go through. And this is backed up by the large range of technical set up options that Smartsheet offer. In government and fortune 500 companies, it is very common for solution implementations to have proper planning. Where considering the OCM, (Organisational Change Management) impact is important. These projects will often provide training and support to implement solutions. The Smartsheet University and partner network also backs up this large scale support. Where there is a large array of information available to support these technical implementation leads.

Smartsheet themself market their product as being secure, scalable, unified, user driven, adaptable and collaborative.

But how does this work from a total info perspective, and what key information have we provided at TSI to back up what Smartsheet claim?

Well in summary here is where we feel Smartsheet practice what they preach, and we award them highly if they meet your industry and project requires.

Secure – Smartsheet have an impressive range of industry security certifications. Privacy Shield, FedRAMP, FIS, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO27001, NERC, NIST, PCI DSS, SOX, SOC 1 to 3 and more emerging each day. This is also backed up by the technical support of gaining these certifications. SSL, TLS, AES and Ciphers are supported.

Scalable – Smartsheet can support a small team of 3, all the way up to a large full scale PMO of 100’s or resources working across a range of industries with contractors, consultants, guests and more. The custom profiles can connect with Jira and Salesforce. And within Smartsheet custom profiles can be set up under Admin, User and Guest. Guest profiles work great for resources external to the organisation and they can access Smartsheet for free. Common scenarios of this would be inviting customers, vendors, partners and various stakeholders to view and edit granular level detail like a specific task.

Unified – As displayed in the certifications. Smartsheet is flexible to integrate to many solutions both native and custom. See below under our FAQ where we have outlined what integrations are supported.

User Driven – Where users are trained in the best practices of using Smartsheet, they will quickly let their creativity kick in and be able to set up a wide range of forms and reports/ The no code aspect of Smartsheet means the platform takes care of the technical aspects, and the users can work on the user experience. As it should be.

Adaptable – Big or small. Users can be adaptable within the Smartsheet environment.

Collaborative – Imagine bringing all your projects, teams and resources together to work collaboratively using our above points. This really is what serves the basis as to why Smartsheet is a leader in Work Management. As Work Management is all about working collaboratively across an entire organisation.

Smartsheet Best Features

Smartsheet Tools Features

Here are what we think are the most popular key features for Smartsheet

Content management
Cross-functional Collaboration
Data connections
Digital asset management
Governance and administration
Intelligent workflows
Managing resources
Process management
Project Portfolio Management
Real time insights
Resource management
Schedule workflows
Secure request management
Team collaboration
Workflow automation