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 to manage multiple enterprise projects—often running up to five in parallel.

There was no standardized tool policy in place, so a plethora of project planning and management tools were in use across the organization, with no integration or consistency. For example: Trello, Microsoft Teams Planner, JIRA, Excel, MS Project, Miro, Confluence, and others.

At the outset, I trialled several modern tools and ultimately chose Smartsheet, primarily because it:

A) Was truly collaborative, flexible, and simple enough for anyone in the organization to set up and estimate their deliverables, provide work estimates, and update progress.

B) Was well-accepted by both business and technical teams—as well as the tool's vendor—since it allowed users to work in familiar formats and control their own tasks. For example, developers preferred Kanban cards; marketing, sales, and finance teams favored the spreadsheet view; and business/team leads used a mix of spreadsheet, Gantt, or project views depending on their preferences.

C) Enabled most team members to update their own tasks using their preferred view. When they couldn’t, the Stream Lead handled updates, added estimates, and tracked progress. For instance, the NZ Sales Stream Lead managed this for his team.

D) Gave every team member access and ownership to detail the work required for their deliverables, add effort estimates and resource requirements, update progress, and flag issues and risks for reporting and action.

I created a simple filter for each team member so they could quickly view and update their workload. Additionally, we used the JIRA integration feature for certain streams to reduce duplication.

E) Allowed each business/technical stream lead to assign resources to tasks and identify where cross-stream collaboration was needed—e.g., Sales assisting during UAT. Again, JIRA integration supported this where applicable.

F) Included "smarts" (formulas) I added to automate task RAG (Red-Amber-Green) status indicators, helping visualize delays and automatically flagging urgency.

G) Supported custom project status templates and portfolio reports I developed, which were reviewed with stream leads and included in formal management reporting.

Unfortunately, I was never able to use the Resource Management module due to additional licensing costs. It's an excellent tool, but suffers from poor marketing—making it virtually 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.​