Has anyone moved from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet? How has your experience been with Smartsheet?

Hi @Eire Zimmermann, 

I helped an organization evaluate both MS-Project and Smartsheet when they were conducting their PM tool RFP.

The short of it is this, MS Project is not caught up with the modern automation and low-code capabilities that you will see in many SaaS PM tools today (Smartsheet, Asana, Workfront, etc.).

Being able to add simple automation with logic like, "If 'Project Status' = 'Red', then Alert XYZ Stakeholder" is made simple with Smartsheet. With this type of low-code functionality, you can begin to remove that robotic, manual work of typing up emails and sending messages from your day-to-day.

Moreover, Smartsheet's reporting capabilities are something that I have yet to see any other PM tool on the market compete with. Think reports for important launch dates, milestones, past due tasks, or at-risk items. 

Then when you add the capabilities of the Smartsheet's logic-driven forms for project intake, you really have a system that can become a pseudo-ERP/workforce management tool. Not to mention Smartsheet's cost is much lower compared to MS Project since you only pay for licenses that manipulate data.

Hope this helps in some regard,

Ian

I used Smartsheet for two years and managed multiple enterprise projects with up to five in parallel.

There was no policy on tools, so there were a plethora of project planning / management tools in use across the organisation without any integration or commonality. For example Trello, TEAMS planner, JIRA, Excel, MSProject, Miro, Confluence and others.

I trialled several of the modern tools at the outset and settled on Smartsheet primarily because it was

A) truly collaborative, flexible and simple enough for anyone in the organisation to setup and estimate their planned deliverables,  workestimates, and update progress.

B) Well accepted by Business and Technical teams and the vendor of the tool, as there was a view that each were familiar with and they could control their own work. For example, Developers preferred Kanban cards, marketing, sales and finance teams were happy with Excel and spreadsheet view and business / team leads used a combination of spreadsheet or project or Gantt view depending on their preference. 

C) Most team members updated their own tasks using whichever view they preferred. Where they could not do so, the Stream Lead updated progress, added estimates, etc. For example the NZ Sales Stream Lead did this for his team.

D) Every team member had access and was tasked with fleshing out the work required for their deliverables, add estimates for the work, and the required resources, update progress, and highlight issues and risks, for reporting and action. (I created a simple filter for each team member so they quickly see / update their workload.) And we used the JIRA integration feature for some streams to minimise duplication.

E) Each business / technical stream lead could assign their resources to work and see where other streams needed their resources to assist, e.g. Sales to help during UAT.   And we used JIRA integration for some streams to minimise duplication.

F) I added smarts (formulas) for  task RAGs to visually see risk of delays and automatically raising the urgency, etc.

G) I built project status template and portfolio reports, which the stream leads and I reviewed and attached them to the formal management reporting. 

Unfortunately, I was never able to try the resource module, due to the additional costs. An excellent tool, but poor marketing ensures it's almost invisible to mainstream project folk.

@Eire Zimmermann, ​

Smartsheet is amazingly flexible. You can configure a template project plan, and view it either as a traditional Gantt chart or as a kanban style board with multiple simultaneous swimlanes derived from any column that is configured as a drop-down list. This allows you to work with the same plan in multiple ways based upon the type of team or preference of the team.   

The only thing of note that Smartsheet cannot do (or at least I did not find it yet) is to level a plan based upon resources and task priority. With the workflow engine, you can automatically send emails based upon any rule you configure. I had RACI columns for every task so I could auto-notify folks when the task was done. Very cool stuff. 

Dashboards are okay but not as powerful as other tools in that each component on the page does not know about any of the other components to auto filter.  Pretty limiting. I export data to another external visualization tool like Domo if the budget allows it. 

Unfortunately I have never used Microsoft Project so I can’t compare. My use with Smartsheet was pretty basic and more for project plans.

Hi @Deborah Gamelin, @Donee Damore, @Ian Herzing ​and @Andrea Bracken,

Can you please chime in and share your thoughts/advice with @Eire Zimmermann?​ 

Thanks.​