Something as simple as a publicly-sharable spreadsheet can greatly improve communication in the workplace, allowing everyone to see how different steps in a project relate to manpower, timing, and other resources. The Oshkosh, Wisconsin School District provides a useful example of Smartsheet’s capabilities.

When David Gundlach, deputy superintendent of the school district, was brought in, the district’s network was often down. It was “an unreliable, dysfunctional setup,” he said.

To transform an organization’s technology infrastructure successfully you need to consider the people involved and their skills, the organizational process, and the technology tools. This is true whether you are in a high-tech start-up, a stable engineering firm, hospital, or school district.

Gundlach used Smartsheet to layout all his project plans — everything from managing education projects, community meetings, website redesigns, school board meetings, and tech implementation and transition projects. He used the Gantt capabilities to show how different tasks are dependent on each other. Showing subtasks provided greater granularity to the plan, and it helped him open discussions with the school board about whether or not a project was doable and what resources would be required.

Because of the complexity of the projects Gundlach had developed, and the number of people he had to keep connected across different community meetings and topics such as budget cuts, he needed to visually communicate the projects’ magnitude to keep everyone moving in the same direction.

“It’s more important to have the community on board than to get the technology. [I knew that if the community was] on board, they would see the value of [a sustainable technology budget] and then deliver on that…. The people are the tough part. The technology is the easy part. [You need to look ] through a systems lens and know that the implications may impact four or five others. And you need to know the interrelationships between those four or five.”

Our general familiarity with spreadsheets is part of their strength and what makes them such great tools for communicating with a diverse audience. “Don’t run away from the things you’ve already mastered,” says Smartsheet’s CEO Mark Mader. “Embrace the things you already know. But you also want to capitalize on the things that are now available to use, such as cross office and cross country sharing. If you can merge those two, you have a very powerful solution.” 

“When I first got here, I said, ‘we’re going build a network that I can plug anything into,’” said Gundlach. Smartsheet had an easy, clean, powerful interface. And since it works with Google Apps, everyone could have the same view of projects.”

Smartsheet, Google Apps, Dropbox, and Box are now all part of the district’s infrastructure. The district said no to many non-web-based tools. “Parents and teachers need the same resources at home as they do at school,” said Gundlach.

The new set of cloud tools helped him educate the school board and the community about the amount of work necessary to finish the transformation. Once the board could see the options, the dependencies between the projects, the resources required, and visualize the process (and obstacles), communication changed and things started improving quickly.

“Five years ago I couldn’t have done what I did without a lot of cash,” said Gundlach. But thanks to the power of the cloud, today Oshkosh has one of the finest state-of-the-art school district infrastructures.

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Avoiding Cultural Issues

One of the potential issues that goes along with using tools in different territories is that you may easily find yourself facing a cultural barrier, as well as any language barriers that you already now about.  Taking cultural considerations into account from the point you decide on a tool is necessary. Your training may have to reflect the diversity of your team, as well as being available in multiple languages. Majors notes, “Until now, we have held informal training sessions, mostly conducted by myself. But as we are growing and building a Smartsheet training program with several internal instructors. We haven’t experienced any difficulties with language/slang so far. But our Brazilian employees all have to be proficient in English. Implementation in a regular Brazilian company would be difficult. An advice to Smartsheet would be to consciously use the ‘simplest’ and most common way of explaining a feature, even if it is less elegant. This would increase the pace of Smartsheet’s expansion into international markets. Actually, it would not be difficult to translate Smartsheet into other languages. A Portuguese version would open up a huge and booming Brazilian market, for example.”

One of Inventure’s key considerations was choosing a tool that its staff could access, no matter where in the world they are. The company significantly reduced the resources it has to put towards IT and maintaing a server. But being sure that the different members of its team were able to fully use that tool was just as important a consideration.

What do you look for when choosing tools that will be used by team members in more than one country?

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Back in July when I originally covered the beta of Smartsheet Task Manager and Project Collaboration service, I had some reservations about adopting it. While I thought it was a strong app, I also believed it was lacking some of the core features I would need.

With their official launch of V2 today, I wanted to give it another look to see how things have changed since I last looked. I also had an opportunity to chat about Smartsheet with founder and chairman Brent Frei who shared with me some of the design philosophy behind the service and productivity in general.

According to Frei, Smartsheet is built upon 5 Foundational characteristics that define and guide the user experience, and where in the process most applications fail. From the initial first impressions through to company wide adoption, Frei claims that Smartsheet is designed to address the needs of real users through each of these phases.

One of the most intriguing of these 5 Foundations to me is their “No Adoption Required” philosophy. If you have ever tried to incorporate a project management tool into a team or collaborative environment, you understand the challenges of trying to get everyone on board. Whatever the case for the resistance, the tool ceases to be effective if the team doesn’t use it. Smartsheet and the “No Adoption Required” philosophy tries to combat this by enabling folks to be a contributor without needing to ever create an account or log in.

Acknowledging that email is still the primary communication tool in most organizations, Smartsheet has really beefed up notification and participation options through email. Using live secure links, users can access the area of the project that is relevant to them and incorporate their updates directly in to the Smartsheet system. These live links are also used for access to attached files.

I really can’t stress how easy and seamlessly this is done. Say I need a status update from a particular user on the line items he is responsible for, I can send them a quick update request link to just those items. They can add updates or comments, change task status, add files etc…

Reporting options will allow these status update emails to be scheduled and automated making it really easy to create a nice consistent workflow process.

File attachments and threaded discussions can also be affiliated with each line item task which is really handy.

Another really thoughtful feature is full change management and recording. Track who completed what and when and highlight the changes over a particular time period.

Options for branding and customization are also nice and can be adjusted for each organization you work with. A new branded distribution program adds customized templates and workflow along with revenue sharing.

All together these improvements and refinements, along with some upcoming reporting options, make Smartsheet a much more compelling option for project and task management than it was when I reviewed them in beta. It is simple to use, easy to access, and affordable.

Even though I’m still not convinced the spreadsheet metaphor is the right one for me, there is a certain comfort and familiarity to Smartsheet that makes it easy to just jump in and start working.

Pricing for Smartsheet starts with a free 2 sheet Starter Account with additional sheets and reporting options available for the higher account levels. I really like that they don’t limit users with any of the accounts. I believe pricing models like that tend to inhibit the desire to bring folks on board. Smartsheet allows you to share with an unlimited number of people with any plan.

Are you ready to give up your spreadsheets for Smartsheet?

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Billing itself as an Online Project Collaboration tool, it features a familiar spreadsheet-like interface as its data presentation method, which should make a lot of folks feel right at home.

Unfortunately, I was able to disqualify smartsheet from contention for my purposes pretty quickly. There is a certain minimum level of functionality that I would think is required for a project management tool and as of right now Smartsheet just doesn’t fit the bill. I kept waiting for an Aha! moment when things would just click or I would discover the hidden menu items to access the project management functionality.

Smartsheet functionality like integrated file uploading and discussions (coming soon) are indeed upgrades to a traditional spreadsheet, but fall short of the consolidated messaging, task and deadline tracking that I would expect to find in a project management application. For example, there doesn’t seem to be a way to view all tasks assigned to me across all of my project sheets.

I think the flaw is that for me a spreadsheet is inherently the wrong vehicle for project management and building on enhanced functionality isn’t going to change that, no matter how well it’s done.

Smartsheet isn’t a bad application, and if you insist on using a spreadsheet for this purpose it can be a worthy upgrade. My recommendation though would be to also investigate one of the other project management solutions available that we have covered like Basecamp, DeskAway, or Joint Contact before making any decision.

Smartsheet Version 2 is currently in Beta and is an update to their existing Classic service. Free beta accounts are currently available while post launch pricing is not yet available.

Do you use spreadsheets for project management? Would an upgrade to Smartsheet be a benefit to you?

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