Lisa, a marketing director at a mid-sized agency, relied on a mix of spreadsheets, emails, and chat apps to manage campaigns. The result?
Missed deadlines, duplicate work, and endless “what’s the status” questions. After switching to Smartsheet, her team cut status meetings by 60% and delivered projects 40% faster.
Here’s the thing: How to use Smartsheet for project management doesn’t have to be rocket science. In this guide, we’ll walk you through practical ways to use Smartsheet.
How to Use Smartsheet for Project Management
Summarize this article for me please⏰ 60-Second Summary
Streamline your projects with Smartsheet
- Use pre-built templates for quick project creation
- Access flexible project planning with various views (Gantt, Board, etc.)
- Automate repetitive tasks and workflows
- Collaborate in real-time with comments, tags, and team discussions
- Track time and manage resources effectively
- Use analytics features to make data-driven decisions
- Track assignments and task relationships
- Integrate with tools like Zapier, Slack, and more
Summarize this article for me pleaseUsing Smartsheet for Project Management
The best project management tools do more than just track tasks. They adapt to your unique project needs, automate tasks, support time tracking, enable team communication, and provide remarkable reporting and analytics.
👀 Did You Know? Smartsheet was initially designed to mimic a spreadsheet but has grown into a powerful project management tool with automation capabilities.
Here’s how you can make Smartsheet work for you.
Provides pre-built templates for project setup
For those who want to skip the setup phase, use Smartsheet’s pre-built templates designed for various projects, including marketing campaigns, construction projects, product launches, and more.
Templates provide a starting point for project management with all the essential project elements already laid out, allowing you to adjust fields as needed.
Plus, you can use them to automate your workflows. These features help you save time and get started on tasks without spending hours building out a project plan from scratch.
Allows flexible project planning
Smartsheet provides a flexible workspace that a project manager can tailor to fit any project.
With Grid View, Gantt View, Card View similar to a Kanban board, and Calendar View, Smartsheet allows you to view your project from different perspectives, making it easy to adapt your workflow as your project evolves.
As an owner or admin of the sheet, you can create a Gantt chart in Smartsheet to manage task dependencies and timelines. You can also adjust the timeline view to fit your project plans—whether quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily.
🧠 Fun Fact: The Gantt chart, a popular project management tool, was invented over 100 years ago and remains one of the most effective ways to track timelines.
Automates repetitive tasks and workflows
While managing multiple moving parts of a project, you need all the help you can get to handle tasks, send reminders, and update statuses automatically.
Smartsheet helps you create custom workflows that trigger based on specific actions. For example, sending notifications when tasks are completed or updating a project sheet when deadlines are nearing.
These automatons make it easy to manage projects with minimal manual intervention, allowing you to focus on higher-level tasks.
Ensures real-time collaboration and communication
Smartsheet eliminates the need for separate communication channels by allowing multiple team members to comment on tasks, add notes, and tag others directly within projects.
The contact list column in Smartsheet makes it easy to assign and notify specific team members of individual tasks, keeping all relevant discussions and decisions in one place.
Smartsheet’s integration with tools like Slack ensures team updates and project communication stays in the same place.
Enables time tracking and resource management
Remember Sarah from marketing? You can avoid such miscommunications and improve efficiency by time-tracking so that projects stay on schedule. Smartsheet offers a built-in resource management section that helps you track team availability and prevent burnout.
The activity log records contributions by each team member, making it easy to monitor the workload and ensure that tasks are evenly distributed.
The Resource Management section also helps with assigning tasks and balancing workloads, ensuring the team’s potential is neither overutilized nor underutilized.
Powers comprehensive reporting and data-driven decisions
Smartsheet’s reporting and analytics features help project managers get insights into projects and effectively track project progress to make informed, data-driven decisions.
The platform’s reporting tools allow you to pull data across multiple sheets to track key metrics like start and end dates, task completion rates, resource utilization, and project costs to create a comprehensive project report.
The project management dashboards offer a high-level view, while detailed reports allow you to drill down into specifics, helping you stay on top of both the big picture and all the details.
Makes possible task assignments and relationship tracking
One of Smartsheet’s key elements is its hierarchical structure. You can create parent and child rows to organize individual tasks within a larger project.
The task relationships feature helps define dependencies, so if one task is delayed, related tasks are automatically updated to reflect the new timeline.
This structure helps break down complex projects into manageable components, making it easier for project managers to oversee different tasks simultaneously.
Allows integrations with other tools
You can use Smartsheet to integrate your existing tools. Need to work with Microsoft Excel? You can sync data easily using CData Connect Cloud or Zapier. While there’s no direct Google Sheets integration, Zapier bridges that gap effectively.
If you use Microsoft Teams, the integration lets you link your project sheets with Teams channels, keeping everyone on the same page without switching tools. Connections like DocuSign, Jira, Slack, Tableau, and others make Smartsheet a central command center for all your project data.
These integrations eliminate information silos, helping teams make better data-driven decisions.
Summarize this article for me pleaseChallenges and Limitations of Smartsheet for Project Management
While Smartsheet is a powerful tool and a perfect fit for many, it does come with some challenges you should know about.
Lack of essential collaboration and reporting features
Even though Smartsheet lets your team work together, it misses some crucial collaboration muscle. The Gantt charts help track project progress but require significant manual input.
While you can create standard progress reports, project managers and teams looking for specialized analytics like Velocity or Burndown charts might want to explore complementary tools.
Limited time-tracking features
Smartsheet is excellent at showing you project start and end dates, but when it comes to tracking actual hours spent on each task? That’s where things get tricky. Project managers might need to rely on external tools or manual methods to monitor time spent on tasks accurately.
This reliance on third-party applications adds complexity to the workflow and may lead to inconsistencies in time reporting. This is not exactly ideal when trying to figure out if you’re using your resources and time efficiently.
High pricing
Here’s the deal with Smartsheet’s wallet impact. It isn’t a free project management tool.
The plans start with $9 per user monthly for the Pro Plan for a maximum team strength of 10. The Business Plan, on the other hand, goes up to $32 per user monthly. Quick match: even the most basic business setup runs you $96 monthly since you need at least three users.
There’s also an enterprise plan for customized quotes. As your team members grow or you need those extra features to manage multiple projects, you might find yourself doing some interesting budget calculations.
This pricing model can be challenging for smaller teams or organizations with limited budgets.
Restricted automation of tasks
Though Smartsheet helps you automate project management for repetitive tasks, the automated workflow options might leave you wanting more.
Sure, you can set up basic custom workflows with pre-built templates, but if you’re managing projects and need advanced automation sequences, you’d need to do more manual work than you’d like.
For teams looking to really save time on workflows, this limitation could mean missing out on some serious efficiency gains.
Minimal customization of templates
The pre-built project management templates on Smartsheet are handy for various project needs, but their customization possibilities are limited compared to other project management tools.
Teams with unique workflows must adapt their processes to fit Smartsheet’s framework rather than vice versa. While efficient for common project scenarios, this standardization can present challenges for teams requiring highly specialized project structures.
Integration challenges
Smartsheet’s integration is promising with Microsoft Teams and similar platforms integrated, but they come with boundaries.
Though it handles common business tools effectively, teams utilizing specialized software often rely on third-party connectors like Zapier. This creates an additional layer of complexity when attempting to centralize data from diverse sources for data-driven decisions.
Given these limitations, it’s only natural to ask, ‘Is there a Smartsheet alternative that provides an overall solution?’ Let’s explore what ClickUp—an all-in-one platform for project management, knowledge management, chat, and AI-powered features—offers.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Use ClickUp for Project Management
ClickUp for Project Management is designed to bring teams closer together through connected workflows, real-time dashboards, and comprehensive documentation.
With ClickUp, project managers can access enhanced task management features, collaboration tools, and AI-powered features that help you simplify processes.
Quick project setup
If we compare Smartsheet and ClickUp, ClickUp flips the script on customization limitations.
You get a playground of possibilities from the moment you start a project. Create custom spaces, set up project hierarchies, and choose from pre-built templates to hit the ground running.
What makes these templates unique is that they are entirely customizable to fit your needs instead of the other way around.
One of the standout features of ClickUp is its customizable project views. You can choose between 15+ views, including Gantt View, List View, Table View, Kanban View, and more, to visualize your work best in the way that suits your team.
For instance, the Gantt Chart View allows you to map out timelines and dependencies visually, while the List View provides a straightforward way to see tasks and their statuses at a glance.
Plus, ClickUp Dashboard View integrates all your key elements, metrics, and KPIs into one place, giving you a high-level overview of your project’s health.
The platform’s built-in note-taking features and ClickUp Docs let you keep all project documentation in one place, while ClickUp Goals help you track progress against more significant objectives. It’s like having a project roadmap that actually shows where you’re going.
Seamless task management
Unlike basic task management tools, ClickUp lets you create rich task environments with custom statuses, priorities, and dependencies.
Want subtasks? Multiple assignees? Time tracking right where work happens? Done, done, and done! Plus, the AI-powered task creation helps you break down complex projects automatically, saving you from those ‘where do I even start?’ moments.
💡Pro Tip: Break your project into smaller, manageable tasks to make tracking progress easier and reduce stress.
Smarter collaborations
Your project communication gets a serious upgrade when you’re using ClickUp. Instead of living in your email inbox, ClickUp’s collaboration tools bring conversations right where the work happens.
Need to brainstorm? Jump into ClickUp Whiteboards, your real-time virtual canvas. Want to document your requirements? Create and share using Click Up Docs without leaving the platform.
You can also use ClickUp’s Proofing feature to highlight markups, annotate PDFs, and more.
With ClickUp Brain, you can even store and retrieve important information instantly. It’s like having your team’s virtual office, complete with every tool you need to work effectively.
The best part? It tailors its insight by learning from your tasks, documents, and team-specific workflows. This means your team gets AI-powered personalized recommendations relevant to your goals. All you need to do is ask for what you need!
💡Pro Tip: Review work progress by regularly evaluating your team’s collaboration. Encourage open communication to identify and address potential challenges early.
Efficient project tracking
Regarding keeping tabs on progress, ClickUp doesn’t just show you the basics. It gives you comprehensive project tracking and reporting tools.
Enhanced workflow with AI-powered automation keeps things moving by handling routine tasks automatically, while real-time reporting lets you spot bottlenecks before they become problems.
Unlike Smartsheets, ClickUp Dashboards bring all your projects, their statuses, and everything you need to know about an ongoing project in one place. With 50+ widgets available to build your dashboard, tracking project progress becomes easier by a mile.
Here’s what a ClickUp user says:
You’re constantly updated with real-time reports of what tasks were completed by your team on a particular day, and ClickUp Milestones takes it a step further by letting you add milestones to your journey.
💡Pro Tip: Celebrate small wins along the way—acknowledging milestones can motivate teams and keep morale high.
Powerful integrations
While Smartsheet might have you hopping between different tools, ClickUp’s integration ecosystem offers you 1000+ integrations with tools like Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, and Slack.
Plus, the manual labor comes down significantly with CRM integrations, project management tools, and other business applications, eliminating errors and giving you a crystal-clear view of your business performance.
ClickUp is clearly the best available alternative for Smartsheets!
Don’t want to commit to a tool yet?
Try out the free ClickUp Project Management Template.
Key features of this template:
- Set up projects in minutes with fully customizable pre-built workflows and views
- Track progress with on-click status updates and real-time dashboards
- Built-in docs and comments ensure all your team stays on the same page with real-time communication
- Dashboards and tracking tools provide instant progress updates for better decision-making
- Adapts easily as your team grows and project complexity increases
Summarize this article for me pleaseReady to ClickUp Your Way to Project Success?
So, which one should you choose when it comes to Smartsheet vs ClickUp? The choice depends on your team’s requirements.
If you value Smartsheet’s spreadsheet-like familiarity and straightforward structure, Smartsheet might be perfect for you. However, if flexibility, collaboration, and AI-driven efficiency are non-negotiable, ClickUp’s all-in-one versatility is hard to beat. For small teams or complex projects, ClickUp’s adaptable platform grows with you.
Remember that the right tool enables your team to do their best work. So, explore, experiment, and empower your team with an efficient workflow today. Want to start your journey with ClickUp?
Sign up for a free ClickUp account now!
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