Iron Mountain relies on Smartsheet Modern Project and Portfolio Management to centralize IT projects, make better decisions, and save more than $4 million annually

Iron Mountain has provided records management, storage, and data services to customers worldwide since 1951. The company serves over 220,000 customers in 58 countries, storing data records in more than 1,000 warehouses across the globe.

Iron Mountain uses Smartsheet Modern Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) to manage all IT projects, automate procurement processes, and deliver accurate, timely, and actionable portfolio insights to their leadership via dashboards with views of each project’s status.

“We use Smartsheet every day to support our strategic goals, across projects, programs, and portfolios,” says Brian Richardson, PMO Tools and Resource Manager for Iron Mountain. “Smartsheet helps us deliver different kinds of metrics to our leadership to enable better governance and decision making.”

Before they began using Smartsheet, the Iron Mountain IT team lacked a centralized PPM solution, relying on six different tools to manage projects and communicate internally and with customers. “We had different tools for resource management, data, and dashboards,” Richardson says. “Project information was very scattered and it was extremely difficult to pull data together into a comprehensive view.” Without a PPM tool, the company struggled to give leadership visibility into projects. “We lacked consistent reporting capabilities, which meant that our executive teams didn’t always have a strong understanding of what was happening with IT projects,” says Richardson.

Adopting Smartsheet Modern PPM to centralize project management and automate workflows

Iron Mountain adopted Smartsheet Modern PPM to automate project workflows and provide centralized management of all IT projects.

“Smartsheet made it easy to stand up project management solutions that make our employees’ lives easier,” says Richardson. “As a result, we didn’t have to invest in dedicated technical resources to support and build PPM solutions.”

The IT team uses Smartsheet Modern PPM to manage projects and align them to corporate strategic initiatives such as cost reduction, revenue, and customer experience. Each initiative contains multiple projects with detailed action steps and timelines, which Smartsheet collects, filters by categories, and surfaces across reports and dashboards. Using Smartsheet Control Center, Iron Mountain populates project templates with schedule information, updated status, and risks/issues. “Control Center is the heart of our PPM solution,” says Richardson. “We use it to collate all project data together into a summary for different reports and dashboards.” The IT team also consolidates all project dashboards into Smartsheet WorkApps, which centralizes all portfolio-level data, including strategic categories and critical milestones. Iron Mountain team leaders also use the Smartsheet Calendar App, which connects Smartsheet data and forms to display events. Additionally, Iron Mountain IT leverages Bridge by Smartsheet, which integrates with the company’s procurement tools, agile management tools, and the ServiceNow ticketing and support software. 

Iron Mountain also relies heavily on workflow automation in Smartsheet to update project approvals and automatically notify project owners of important milestones. Iron Mountain IT also includes automated alerts with Smartsheet Dynamic View to share editable project data, and the company integrates Smartsheet Modern PPM with the organization’s JIRA project tracking software.

Iron Mountain also leverages Smartsheet to streamline procurement and customer implementation processes. For example, each new procurement request is entered and approved in Smartsheet, and new implementations are managed in the software. Implementation customers receive updated status information via dashboards. The Iron Mountain facility team can now support offline updates of critical information regarding warehouse security and compliance using Smartsheet Offline Forms via the mobile app.

The company has also expanded its use of Smartsheet beyond PPM, using the tool to manage safety audits, address validation, strategic planning, asset management, timesheets, and resource management. Additionally, Iron Mountain has shifted to app rationalization and has removed or avoided the need to use several apps by building the functionality of those apps directly into Smartsheet.

Increased project visibility and improved decision making 

By using Smartsheet Modern PPM to consolidate disparate project information into a single platform, Iron Mountain can give its leadership teams better visibility into the status of all IT projects. “Smartsheet Modern PPM puts all our project information in one place. That means we’re able to get Smartsheet dashboards in front of our leaders to show them a comprehensive view of all projects, while tying those projects directly to our strategic goals,” says Richardson. 

“We can show which projects are green and moving on schedule and budget, and which ones are red and might need more attention. Now, when leaders are making planning decisions, they can see what they need to do and how we can improve our response times to improve customer service.”

Annual savings of 200 hours and $8,000 per user 

Smartsheet Modern PPM automation has helped Iron Mountain eliminate previously-manual project management and update processes, significantly reducing time spent on administrative tasks.

“IT is not a huge organization within Iron Mountain, but we still have several hundred projects happening at any given time,” Richardson says. “Making updates and tracking everything used to be a slow, painful, manual process. That’s all gone away through the automation we have in Smartsheet Modern PPM.”

In a 2022 survey, Iron Mountain discovered that its 300-plus licensed Smartsheet users are saving an average of 212 hours each annually, $8,049 in annual savings per user. This amounts to a combined savings of more than $4 million per year. When including non-licensed Smartsheet users, that number climbs to more than $18 million annually.

Increased awareness of business processes and project milestones 

Iron Mountain is relying on automated workflows in Smartsheet to provide better awareness of processes to key project owners across the business. “Automation is key to our PPM solution, with project managers receiving notifications and approval alerts automatically,” Richardson says. 

“We have multiple groups, including IT leaders and finance, that are involved with our procurement processes, for example. They all have to take steps along the approval process, and we use automated workflows to notify them of each step as well as to show how far along each project is.”

Since Iron Mountain adopted Smartsheet several years ago, the organization has created nearly 50 internal solutions to simplify project management. “We saw value from this tool very quickly,” says Richardson. “We were on a long journey that included a lot of project management tools, but we’ve finally found the solution that works for our business.”

For more information about this story, please see our case study.