From the course: Managing Projects with Smartsheet

Solution planning

- Before you start building your solution out in Smartsheet, it's essential that you plan and that you map it out. Failing to do so can result in a system that is overly complicated to use, both for you and for your users. It can also become cluttered with lots of files which don't really serve a purpose, and ultimately your team may struggle to adopt your solution and they may abandon it altogether. Now, when it comes to building your solution, you have three different options available to you. Firstly, you can hire Smartsheet to build this out for yourself. Secondly, you can hire an external contractor like myself to undertake this for you. And thirdly, you can build out your solution. Now, the rest of this course, I'm going to walk you through exactly how you can do the latter there and build out your solution with some recommendations along the way. Nevertheless, having a high level plan is absolutely critical to ensure that you build out an effective solution from the outset and that it interacts with itself in the right way. So the first thing that I'd recommend that you do is you document your specific needs, create a high level plan of what you're looking to achieve. So this all begins by defining your objectives and asking yourself these kinds of questions. What is your overarching objective for using Smartsheet? What is the end goal, what are you looking to achieve? Also think about what you need to track and report on. What are the KPIs that your stakeholders need to see? Think about who needs access to Smartsheet and what do they need to be able to do? Is it just viewing resources as an example or is it that you want certain individuals to enter data as an example? And think about who needs to see what. Do you need to lock certain information down to a select subset of users? Just think about access. Once you've done this, you can then think about the kinds of documents and artifacts and templates that you want to create for your team to use. Think about what team members are looking for and what will make their life easier, what will help them manage projects most effectively. And think about the potential relationship between those resources so that it can minimize their manual work and basically automate some of their processes. As an example, think about whether each project needs a certain set of templates, such as a project plan, a risk register, a dashboard. You get the idea and think about what components may be required in each, what is going to be commonplace among those projects that you can build in from the outset. And then think about your reporting and quickly getting an understanding of what's going on on the ground. So do you want those project toolkits to flow up into a high level program or portfolio summary? Once you've done this, you can then move on to creating what's called a solution map. So I've created one for you as an example. You may need to alter this particular solution map to meet your specific needs, but it's a really good one to follow and it's what we're going to be creating throughout the rest of this course. So as you can see here, the way this works is that everything that we create will be flowing upward to a program dashboard, and that program dashboard will give us a summary of every single project within our system. We've got four projects created, just as an example, and each project has their own unique dashboard so we can see what's happening on each project at the time. Now each project will have its own toolkit of templates that we will have created ahead of time. These are standardized, they will be available in our repository, and we can quickly create them for any new project that we need. So again, these are templates that you may need to adapt to suit your needs, but good ones to create for a project include action item tracker, project plan, stakeholder communication plan, a risk register, an issue log, and a lessons learned log. And these will all flow up to the project dashboard, or in other words, on the project dashboard, you'll be able to get insights from these particular templates. So that's the solution map visualized. The other thing that you can do instead of, or as well as is itemize that solution map. So I've built this out in a grid or a sheet, and essentially it's the same thing, but the benefit of creating it like this is that we can add further columns and information, which may help this process. So as an example, we can put descriptions in. We could also put some interactions in. So as an example, we may want the action item tracker to link with the project plan and create some automations there to reduce manual work. So we may want to specify that here, but it works in very much the same way. So you can see the roll up with a parent and child relationship, and you would just pretty much, you can create this for as many projects that you need. So that's the itemized version. It's also very, very effective and something that I recommend that you explore. Ultimately, effective solution planning in Smartsheet is the foundation of a successful project management system. By identifying your needs, creating a detailed solution map like this, and building incrementally, you can develop a solution that is efficient, user-friendly, and widely adopted. Next up, we'll delve into the different user accounts available in Smartsheet and also permissioning so that you can set up your solution for success.

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