Amplifying Modern Project and Portfolio Management success through new innovation

Picture this. You have just received approval for a handful of interconnected and complex projects. All of these projects align to one revenue goal but need to be run by several people on your team. You have invested in a traditional project portfolio management tool. There is just one problem: It’s geared towards professionals with traditional project management training. Not everyone has that. So many are accidental project managers — people who are good with details — who have tinkered, optimized processes, and are making it all work without specific project management training. From strategic planning to prioritization, work execution to delivery and reporting, Smartsheet continuously innovates  to help you achieve faster business outcomes with technology that’s intuitive to use. We are continuing to innovate in a way that allows everyone in your organization to plan the work, do the work, and scale the work easily.

This quarter, I’m focused on the Smartsheet Platform for Modern Project and Portfolio Management, and giving you a peek at a number of innovations scheduled to release this quarter that’ll make your day to day that much easier — even if you aren’t a project manager by trade.

Plan the work: Align people, priorities, and purpose

Planning is not necessarily an annual or multi-year process any more. Whether launching a new product, racing to enter a market, creating a competitive edge, or just retaining and growing your customer base, we know you have to make quick decisions that focus on removing bottlenecks. But, how do you support such decisions without assessing their impact on the projects, programs, and portfolios that are in flight or in the pipeline? Smartsheet helps you identify and prioritize projects and programs that closely align with organizational strategy. And, when overall goals and directions change, it can drive adaptive, business-driven reprioritization to support the new goals. These two new enhancements will help you do just that: 

• PPM Maturity Assessment tool: Use the Smartsheet PPM Maturity Assessment to get a comprehensive picture of the maturity of your project and portfolio management and learn what steps you can take to improve it. (Available now)
• Capacity view: Use capacity view to identify over- or under-resourced allocation across your organization, spot people available to take on new work, and forecast hiring needs to make efficient staffing decisions. (Available now with Resource Management by Smartsheet)

• Burndown charts: Combining Portfolio WorkApps with a custom Bridge extension helps teams accelerate work execution. Agile teams can use built-in configuration options, automation for the most common agile workflows, and JIRA integration to deliver work on time and within budget. They can stay on top of multiple sprints and user stories with powerful visualization using Kanban boards, parking lot for categorizing project items, and the newly available burndown charts. Users can now create burndown charts with Work Insights to visualize team productivity across sprints and projects. This makes it incredibly easy to identify scope creep and project delays, providing a snapshot of how teams actually work. (Available now for Enterprise Plan users)

Do the work: Work efficiently to achieve more 

Leaders need to connect the people, processes, and technologies necessary to successfully move from strategy to execution. Smartsheet, The Enterprise Work Management Platform, empowers everyone to achieve their goals and deliver superior results by fostering collaboration and removing the barriers that keep you from getting the work done. Here are some exciting product enhancements to make work in Smartsheet even more seamless:

• GenAI: From solving real business challenges faster, to quickly finding new insights to inform critical business decisions, to scaling work across an entire organization, Smartsheet is unleashing the power of its platform with GenAI to deliver even greater value for customers like:
  • Get insights in seconds: You will be able to ask Smartsheet a question like “Which programs were over budget last month by department?” and Smartsheet will leverage machine learning to provide sheet-level insights and data visualizations in seconds, while applying a comprehensive approach to security, compliance, and privacy. (Coming soon)
  • Get answers fast: Need help building, configuring, or extending a solution? The new AI-powered help assistant will enable customers to get a customized response based on where they are in the context of their work. (Coming soon)
  • Get started right: GenAI will help you quickly find and personalize the right template so you can get started building sophisticated solutions in seconds. The AI help assistant will also generate formulas based on a simple description of what you need to do.  (Coming soon)

• TIME(): A new formula that will allow you to track the granularity of a function down to hours, minutes, and seconds, where you previously only had the granularity of days. (Coming soon)
• Formatting enhancements to Work Insights: Make your dashboards pop with consistent formatting of font, text, emphasis (bold, italic), and color of your Work Insights widget; Change Work Insights chart types and chart colors to suit your brand. (Coming soon)

Scale the work: Transform your business, faster

Here comes the tricky part. You’ve put strategy in place, communicated this strategy organization-wide, aligned your teams, empowered them with a toolset of their choice, supported their unique ways of doing work, and accelerated your time-to-value by delivering your projects on time, on budget, and on quality. 

Now, you need to scale this success across multiple business units — or even across the organization — with integrations with other applications and systems of record to support better decision making, efficiency, insights, and compliance. Smartsheet is committed to, and actively investing in, the scalability and reliability of the solutions you need as an organization to grow. Here are just a few of the investments we’ve made and the new enhancements coming up this quarter that’ll help you: 

• Scale and performance investments: We’ve doubled down on the key scale and performance systems responsible for storing, sharing, loading, and processing your data, cell links, and formulas. This means lightning-fast data, cell links, and formula processing for you wherever you are. 
• Advance capability evaluations: Want to know what it’s like to ensure data alignment across platforms or get granular sharing control so that you can share information with the right people at the right time — but not sure if you want to commit? Try Data Shuttle and Dynamic View before you buy. (Coming soon)
• Easier professional services access: Want to scale but not sure how? Want to make purchases of Professional Services, but not sure which service fits your business needs? It’s easier than ever to purchase Smartsheet Professional Services. Use an order form to plan for and buy our range of services and redeem it towards Professional Services and statement of work packages whenever you have the need. (Coming soon)
• Data egress for reports and dashboards: System administrators can enforce data egress policies on reports and dashboards, as well as internal users, for better security and governance. (Coming soon)

Smartsheet helps you scale to hundreds — even thousands — of projects through automation at the portfolio level, project level, and at the workflow level. This accelerates innovation that can be scaled up on-demand to thousands of users. Smartsheet continues to demonstrate that it is built for flexibility, scale, and configurability to accommodate the rapidly changing needs of its customers, whether it’s by simplifying complex internal processes so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),  can focus on the critical tasks of forecasting severe storms, monitoring the climate, and managing fisheries, or fast tracking life-saving clinical research at Phillips, all while it ensures patient safety, quality, and integrity.   

We have a lot more exciting new things coming your way at our annual customer conference, Smartsheet ENGAGE 2023, happening in Seattle Sept. 19-21, 2023. To see these features in action at ENGAGE, attend sessions in the Modern PPM track, which includes topics like assessing your PPM maturity; scaling your people, process, and technology; and getting expert guidance on how Smartsheet can help you meet your business goals. 

Also, stay tuned — I’ll be back later this quarter with exciting news from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2023. Until then, you can get notified when these enhancements go live by subscribing to the product announcements channel in the Community. If you’re not a customer yet, go ahead and give us a try here. 

Thank you! 
Ben Canning Senior Vice President, Product Management

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