Joshua RussoInnovation Manager| Lifoam IndustriesHuntsville, Al, United States
I've searched but not found this specific topic.
Are there PMP's (or at least PMBOK-compliant) PM's or PGM's out there who have transitioned from MS Project to SmartSheet? Were there features you or your teams continue to miss? Advantages you prefer?
I love the workflow features, but...
- I'm concerned that the reporting/dashboards might not work well for multiple projects/PMO with dozens in a portfolio.
- Some of my more technical PM's are concerned about specific features, such as MSP's powerful task highlighting/filtering.
Backound - Distributed project teams, mostly engineering/product development/manufacturing, mostly waterfall, have been using PWA/Sharepoint, Corporate IT considering a consolidation (a switch, in my team's case) to SmartSheet.
Thanks in advance for any feedback! Saving Changes...
I've played around with Smartsheets a bit and there are some things that I like about it however I feel that it is missing some of the elements that I have come to expect from Ms Project such as different types of views, reporting, synchronization with PWA and things of the sort.
I do like the look and feel of Smartsheets however and I think that once you get over the fact that it's not MS Project it's kind of fun to work with.
The same applies to Monday.com ... I love the look and feel however I couldn't import MS Project files so that was pretty much the end of my experiment.
Compatibility and the ability to open Ms Project files is important. Saving Changes...
I am not a fan of migrating from MSP to SmartSheet. They are not the same at all. Saving Changes...
Wade HarshmanScrum Master| GDITIndianapolis, In, United States
I have used SmartSheet and it worked well for my projects. It is much lighter than MS Project or Excel, but once you learn the formulas you can accomplish quite a bit. You can also build some decent reports and dashboards, but access to some features depends on your license.
What SmartSheet lacks in power it makes up for in collaboration. I can do a lot with MS Project, but I've always found it difficult to get anyone else to open it. I'd waste a lot of time porting information into more palatable formats for my project teams or stakeholders, and then making their changes in Project because they refused to use it.
With SmartSheet, all I have to do is share the sheet and specify privileges (viewer / editor / admin). I can automate messages to users when they need to make updates. I can even create different views so that someone like me can see the gantt chart with all the relevant data, but another user might only want to see a calendar or a card view.
Also, there are several good plugins available, so you can access your SmartSheets from your phone or another app like Slack.
I agree with Joey that compatibility isn't great. It can be done via Excel, but you should use MS Project or SmartSheet, not both. Keep a single source of truth for your project.
Disclaimer: It's been several months since I used SmartSheet, and they frequently add new features and updates. Saving Changes...
