While the professionals get ready for the biggest bowl game in the NFL, the days leading up to the Super Bowl for us normal folks are filled with plans for elaborate appetizers, friendly game-day bets, and HR bending the company dress policy to allow employees to sport their team’s jerseys. While most of us may never play in the Big Game, project management is awfully similar to the Super Bowl when you break down the players, the strategies, and the outcomes. Don’t believe me? I’ll bet my spicy queso nachos on it.
The Quarterback / Project Manager
The quarterback is the most important position on the offensive side, and is responsible for communicating the play from his coaches to the other players in the huddle. Similarly, a project manager is the go-to person for questions regarding strategy for moving a project forward. PMs gather insight from many people, but they alone are the ones to make the call on important decisions.The PM keeps deliverables prioritized in the same way the QB maps out the drive to the endzone.
The Offensive Linemen / Project Team Members
These guys are the offensive muscle, protecting the quarterback from setbacks. In the same way, project team members provide support and play a large role in how much the PM can get done. In other words, the perfect spiral thrown neatly into a wide receiver’s hands would never be possible without the offensive linemen, just as the giant, intimidating project would never be completed under budget and on time without the hard working project team members.
The Kicker / Skilled Worker
The kicker on a football team is responsible for one thing during a game: kicking. And boy, is he good at his job. When a team gets close enough to the endzone, they call out the kicker to score 3 points with a field goal – and with a niche skill that can determine the outcome of the game, just imagine the pressure he’s under. Often, a critical project task is dependent on one or two very specialized resources – only they can drive it home.
The Fans / Stakeholders
In certain cases, fans can play a large role in how their football team performs (Seattle’s 12th man, anyone?). The crowd that fills the stadium often has a lot invested in their team -- whether it is an emotional investment, an expensive seat ticket, or the expectation of a good game – and that should put pressure on the team to deliver for them. Stakeholders in a project act in much the same way. They have invested interest in the project, and it would do well for the project manager and her team to keep them satisfied with the end result, whatever that may be.
Break down large deliverables into smaller plays. Want to score a touchdown? You’ll need to get a first down before that’s a real possibility. Boss expecting the new product release to blow his mind? Find out what’s achievable in the given time frame before biting off more than you can chew.
Manage your resources. You wouldn’t catch a skilled quarterback handing off the ball to a running back who isn’t at 100%, nor would you expect a reasonable project manager to overload one employee with several tasks if three of his team members have extra time and energy to help out.
Make smart changes when needed. A quarterback on the line of scrimmage can call an alternate play depending on the opposing team’s defensive positions. Likewise, if scope creep is plaguing an already overwhelmed project manager, she needs to take control and refocus her project.
Keep an eye on the critical path. There’s no time for fancy plays when the clock is running down, and the quarterback should be quick when necessary. The project manager should be equally vigilant about her time table. Determining what must be done and how to make it happen efficiently is key.
Get more done by collaborating. Great teams know how to communicate on and off the field. A project team must also communicate efficiently, which improves the effectiveness of collaboration.
Whether you’re going to Disneyland or out to a celebratory lunch, the end of a successful project (or game) deserves to be treated as a momentous occasion.
And if your project was unsuccessful, or the game lost, your team will reflect on the plays and strategy chosen and improve upon it for future opportunities – because the possibility of clinching the victory next time around will be too sweet to pass up.
Spreadsheets have a come a long, long way over the years, and plenty of companies today are duking it out to build the best one. So we took a look at the evolution of the spreadsheet and which elements make the best one to serve the way you work today and into the future.
Take a look...
The spreadsheet of the future:
is intuitive and simple to use
is powerful and flexible
doesn’t require any training
is online, so you can share and access it from anywhere
helps you manage work more productively than ever before
Try the spreadsheet of the future now at smartsheet.com/future.
Embed The Evolution of the Spreadsheet infographic on your site:Copy and Paste the Code below
<img src="http://www.smartsheet.com/files/haymaker/Evolution-of-Spreadsheet.png"><br /> The Evolution of The Spreadsheet | An infographic by the team at <a href="http://www.smartsheet.com">Smartsheet</a>
Do you use Smartsheet to work with a dispersed or remote team? You’re not alone - tens of thousands of our customers use Smartsheet to help make the world a little bit smaller when it comes to working with teams in different parts of the globe. Magnolia Bakery keeps their international expansion consistent from Dohar to Qatar, and Enterasys virtually oversees an international product team with Smartsheet. In fact, Smartsheet is used in over 160 countries! Whether you’re working with clients in different time zones or you work abroad yourself, here are some of our top pointers for using Smartsheet outside of the US.
#1 Language Settings
Changing Your Language in Smartsheet: Smartsheet is available in 7 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Russian. Changing the language in your Personal Settings to one of these 7 will also translate the interface elements in the application into your selected language.
To change your language:
Click Account > Personal Settings
Change the value in the Language (Country) drop-down list
Save
Sign out by clicking Account > Sign Out
Sign back in to see the changes updated in your sheet
Finding Resources in Another Language: Our Help Center articles are translated into 7 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Russian.
You can change the language in the Smartsheet Help Center from the Choose Your Language drop-down list in the right panel.
For more translated resources like the Smartsheet overview video, product tour, a version of the Smartsheet website is now available in Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, and French.
#2 Changing the Format of Dates
One of the questions we frequently see from Smartsheet users outside of the US concerns date formatting. You can adjust this formatting by changing your personal language settings, simply follow the same steps listed above to change your language in Smartsheet.
For example, you can change the Language to English (United Kingdom) to have all dates that are listed in a date column display in dd/mm/yy format.
You can also change your time zone from here. The time zone your Smartsheet account is set to determines when you receive automated email notifications and reminders. Notifications and reminders are sent between midnight and 5AM in your time zone.
# 3 Formatting Numbers as Currency
You can format any number in your sheet into various international currencies using the $ icon in the left toolbar. We currently support symbols for the Dollar/Peso ($), Brazilian Real (R$), Euro (€), Pounds (£), New Shekel (₪), Rupee (Rs), Yen (¥), Ruble (pyб), and Zar (R).
#4 Payment Options
Smartsheet accepts payments through Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and JCB credit cards, as well as through PayPal, in the following currencies:
US Dollar - USD
Australian Dollar - AUD
Canadian Dollar - CAD
Euro - EUR
British Pound - GBP
Japanese Yen - JPY
#5 Use an International Keyboard
If you have the international keyboard enabled on your computer, you'll be able to type non-English characters into cells of your sheets. Text can also be entered right-to-left if the keyboard is set to Hebrew, or other languages where this is the standard.
Instructions for Mac users.
Instructions for Windows users.
Til next week, dig in and explore!
- Support Team
What does it take to entice an Excel addict away from their Microsoft ways? The allure of real-time access... perhaps redefining “efficiency” or taking teamwork to the cutting edge. These are just a few of the reasons that Lee Odess, general manager of the lean, fast-moving startup Brivo Labs left behind archaic offline spreadsheets in favor of Smartsheet and hasn’t looked back. Today? “Smartsheet is a core part of what we do and how we work,” said Odess.
Here, Odess shares his thoughts as a former Excel addict:
Brivo Labs is a startup formed out of Brivo Systems, a company that has specialized in cloud-based access control and security for the past 15 years. We take Brivo’s core API and leverage it in other areas of “contextual security” if you will – in other words, attaching your social identity from the virtual world to a physical token, like a QR code, on your iPhone, and then using that identity to trigger something in the physical world.
Here’s an example – today, when you make a reservation with OpenTable and you arrive at the restaurant, you still have to check in with the hostess when you arrive. Our products take this experience to the next level. With your phone connected to your OpenTable identity and the bluetooth capability enabled on your phone, when you arrive for your reservation, you’re automatically checked in, no extra work on your part. You can head to the bar, grab a drink, and the restaurant’s system will send you a text when your table is ready.
We work to develop products like this and make our API accessible to others so that they can build their own solutions.
We used to use Excel for everything: project management, product management, communication with our board, you name it.
We were addicted to Excel. We spent our days and nights in Excel.
There are some big challenges that come along with living your life in Excel: files aren’t live and are incredibly silo’d. There are huge obstacles when it comes to version control. It wasn’t just our files that were silo’d, our team was too. We spent way too much time managing documents.
I was introduced to Smartsheet by one of the guys on our team, and at first we used it just as a place to share files more or less, as opposed to a working file in Excel. He put together a sheet and then shared it with the rest of the team. When I first opened up Smartsheet, my initial reaction was just, “WOW.” So was the rest of my team’s.
So why does Smartsheet win out over Excel?
Files are live With an online spreadsheet, my team is actually able to work together in real time. It also adds transparency and serves as a communication tool since I also use it to share our sheets with our Board, so that they stay updated on our progress whenever they’d like. Now when a Board member emails me with a question, I send them an updated row. When I make significant changes to a sheet, I send them a notification directly from Smartsheet to look at the changes, saving hours of time.
We’ve gotten rid of revision history headaches We’re a startup – things are going 100 miles an hour for us. Every second we waste trying to find a certain file is a big loss for us. The real-time aspect of Smartsheet saves us a hell of a lot of time, and we know immediately where to go to find the one version of a doc.
We have to eat our own dog food We’re a cloud company selling cloud-based tools. We preach collaboration and have to live and breathe it to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Smartsheet helps us do that.
Today at Brivo Labs, Smartsheet has become a core part of who we are and what we do. Project management, product management and the development lifecycle, file sharing, event planning – it’s all in Smartsheet now. We’ve got a high level view of where all of our different products stand in their respective lifecycles, if they’re on schedule, when they’ll hit the market, and our ongoing plans.
I love digging into the product and finding new ways to help my team work together more efficiently. For example, RYG balls are a fantastic way to quickly communicate status to other team members. It may seem like a small addition to your workflow, but anything to help us work together better is a pretty big win.
The other collaboration features are an ideal fit for startup teams, especially being able to share sheets with different viewing permissions. Automated alerts and notifications keep everyone on track and on the same page. Discussions keep our conversations going long after meetings are over.
We’ve started using templates to save our development timelines. When you build the number of products that we do, it’s key not to waste time reinventing the wheel. The spreadsheet interface is flexible enough to let you design your workflow the way that works best for your team, and then when you’ve perfected it, you can save that process as a template and use it again and again.
We’re working together in a really synergistic way, that just wasn’t possible with Excel.
I can tell you, since I started using Smartsheet, I haven’t opened Excel once. It’s like going from riding a 10-speed bike to a motorcycle… why would you ever go back?
Using Smartsheet to manage human resource tasks and processes helps many companies stay organized and efficient. From tracking candidates and organizing the interview process, to new employee onboarding and performance review planning – Smartsheet is a great way to manage it all. So this week, for all of you out there using Smartsheet to keep your team activity on track, we’re sharing three simple steps to use Resource Management to help with staff scheduling.
With a birds eye view of your team’s availability – on task assignments AND vacation time – you’ll avoid scheduling a team member when they’re unavailable.
A Little Bit About Resource Management
Resource management is a simple way to see who on your team is busy and who isn’t in a comprehensive dashboard view.
In this example, you’ll see how to use resource management to add a new level of your team’s availability into your resource view: not only will you see their allocation across all projects, you’ll be able to account for holidays and vacations.
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Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re just beginning to use resource management with your team (resource management is available on Team and Enterprise plans only):
Use Contact columns. When you’re assigning members of your team to different tasks – or in this example, asking them to enter their time off in your sheet – make sure that the column you’re using for your team members is a “Contact List” column.
Project sheets work with resource management. Resource management works with project sheets. These sheets need to have both Dependencies and Resource Management enabled with the Assigned Resource and Allocation % columns defined on the Resource Management tab of the sheet.
Step 1: Create a Vacation Sheet for your team to use to add their planned time off.
Step 2: Create an Allocation % column (called Booked % here).
Enable Booked % as the Allocation % column in the Resource Management settings for your vacation sheet.
Be sure to format this column as a % column by highlighting the entire column and clicking the % button in the formatting toolbar.
Step 3: Enable Resource Management on your other project sheets.
With Resource Management enabled on all of the sheets your team is working on, you’ll have a comprehensive view of your team’s time in your dashboard.
Now, you’ll rest easy knowing you haven’t assigned a team member to a task when they’re not available.
Learn more about resource management:
Getting Started Guide
Help
Template Designed for RM
How are you using resource management? We’d love to know!
Til next week, dig in and explore!
- Support Team
Today we honor Martin Luther King Jr., one of the greatest civil rights leaders of our time. Here in the United States and abroad, individuals remember the values he promoted and the work he did to advance the civil rights movement. One of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most inspiring attributes was his skill in leadership. Here are five inspirational quotes about leadership from influential leaders to keep in mind today and going forward.
Dr. King’s speeches and leadership during the civil rights movement were guided by the value represented in this quote, to always do what is right, not just when it is convenient or easy.
Helen Keller, an author, political activist, and lecturer, campaigned for social and civil rights and was a prolific leader in her vision for equality. As all successful leaders know, while one person can speak his or her mind, it takes many people working together to make great things happen.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, led the country through the Civil War, abolished slavery, and modernized the economy. There’s no questioning Lincoln’s outstanding leadership, which was strongly tied to his values and belief in accountability.
Mahatma Gandhi has inspired nonviolent civil disobedience around the world by his example, and one of those who was moved by Gandhi’s peaceful form of protest was Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi’s wisdom encourages us to act on our ideas and beliefs, because we won't achieve anything if we don’t begin.
Malala Yousafzai, a 16 year old Pakistani student, is an education and women’s rights activist. After a failed assassination attempt by the Taliban, international attention was drawn to her and the issue of global educational rights. Almost overnight, she became a leader in the movement and someone people looked to for wisdom.
Today we celebrate Dr. King’s life, and use it as an opportunity to see how much work is still necessary to improve human rights everywhere in the world. Share these images and quotes as a tool for inspiration and proof of how a great leader can truly spark change in the world.
If creating great content to drive inbound traffic is part of your marketing strategy, having an efficient way to manage your content calendar is a must. You need a way to plan the content in alignment with business goals, coordinate and communicate with your team as well as external content providers, and have easy visibility into the big picture. After some trial and error, here’s the system I’ve worked out. You are welcome to use it.
Step 1. Write it all down in an organized way
It’s no secret that creating organized lists frees your brain to focus on the creative work you really want to do. Nowhere is this truer than when managing a content calendar. So get it all down on paper or screen, and out of your head. A spreadsheet is great for this.
The column headers you use are critical, because they force you to identify critical aspects of each piece of content. To make it easy, here’s a screenshot of my content calendar in spreadsheet format with all the headers shown. Feel free to steal them, because they really work.
As you can see, for every single piece of content, we track:
Title
Author
Draft due date
Publication due date
% Complete
Objective (more on this below)
Primary keywords
Secondary keywords
Target audience/persona
CTA
Media type
Art requirements
If this list feels like a lot, think of it this way: The next time someone offers you an idea for a blog post, you can sit together with the editorial calendar and say, “Let’s see where this fits in with our content plan.” Within a few minutes, it will become extremely apparent why something will or won’t make the cut without you ever having to play the role of bad guy.
2. Identify the objective of every piece of content
Obviously, not every piece of content is for primarily for lead generation. (Oh, the horror!) Sometimes you just need to educate your existing users about a new or existing feature, or maybe you’re inserting your company into a current news story in order to be part of a larger conversation. (“Newsjacking” is more about awareness than lead gen, and it’s fine as long as you are being relevant, tasteful and on brand.)
Do this in a disciplined way by creating a fixed list that you choose from each time - not some never-ending proliferation of choices like the tags on your blog posts. Here you can see that we use a drop-down menu, so there is no cheating.
3. Track the big picture
You know the 80/20 rule, right? In a good content mix, at least 80% of posts should be information the prospect actually wants and no more than 20% should be promotional or about company news.
I’m such a geek about making this visible that I actually color-code my content by objective. If you create your calendar on a white board, colored markers will do the trick. Since my calendar is built in a cloud-based spreadsheet, I use conditional formatting. (Note: conditional formatting changes your spreadsheet data or formatting automatically based on certain conditions you set.) Using this trick, the sheet color-codes the content for me automatically.
Whether you use Excel, Smartsheet, a white board, or any other solution the point is to have a simple way to keep your eye on the overall content mix.
Here is a screenshot of how it looks with the color-coding after I have toggled my content calendar from spreadsheet view to over to calendar view. (Green is for inbound content, blue is for product announcements and other company news.)
Even though we don’t post new content every day, we can easily see that what we are posting is working overtime to achieve our objectives, and where we have opportunities to do more, or might want to make adjustments.
4. Have a system for keeping everyone informed and accountable
Sharing the calendar with your collaborators goes without saying. There are a variety of ways to do this, but we prefer the cloud, because we work with several freelancers.
In addition, using conditional formatting allows you to systematize alerts that go to everyone who shares the calendar. For example, in our content calendar all draft due dates are set to automatically turn red one week before the publication date. (See red due date circled in the screen shot below.) If you use a white board you can also change dates to red by hand, so everyone who checks the calendar can instantly see what’s due soon.
5. Connect your to do list reminders to your calendar
Many apps offer this function; if you are choosing an online solution, make sure you choose one that does. Personally, I set email reminders to go out a week before items are due. (See yellow alerts in the screenshot below.)
There you have it. 5 simple steps to getting your content calendar organized and focused this new year.
Plus, as a special promotion, we created a Free Sheet for you to start using right away! Click below to open your Free Editorial Calendar Sheet.
Proper planning and task timelines are key ingredients for any successful project plan, and lag days are helpful in customizing your plans when dependencies are enabled. When you’re using predecessors and dependencies, lag days are another key piece of the Smartsheet project management tool set to know a little something about.
Lag days are a way to adjust the relationship between predecessors in your project plans. This week, we’ll take a look at three different scenarios that are pretty common in project management.
How to Use a Lag Day to Add a Delay Between Tasks
We’ll use a common HR onboarding scenario to illustrate this example. Most new employees have a bit of a delay between accepting an employment offer and their first day on the job. In our example, there’s a two week difference:
To establish a two week delay in your interview / onboarding process, enter 10 Lag Days in the Predecessor option for your New Employee Start Date:
In our example, we’re using a positive number of days to push out the next activity or task.
How to Use Lag Days to Move Tasks Forward in Your Timeline
To illustrate this use of Lag Days, we’ll use an event planning example.
You’re planning your Customer Conference to start on January 13, 2014 with five packed days of presentations and events. You want to host a Question and Answer Booth with one of your partners, and they are only available on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. There’s a risk of the conference date slipping if you aren’t able to get the hotel you want. If it does slip, you want to be able to change the date of the Conference itself and have the dates for the Q&A Booth change automatically.
First schedule your Conference Date as a task (Duration = 5 for the business week), then set up your Q&A Booth (Duration 2 for the number of days you’d like the booth to be up and running), but no Start or Finish Date for it yet. Next, link the tasks together by clicking on the Predecessor cell for the Q&A Booth and select the pencil icon to enter the Predecessors window.
To link the Q&A Booth to the Conference Dates, start with the Row # for the Conference Dates Task, which in this case is 1. The Predecessor Type you’ll need to here is Finish-to-Finish. If you stopped at this step, both the Conference Dates and Q&A Booth would finish on the same day.
However, since you want the Q&A Booth to be on Tuesday and Wednesday of your conference and the conference itself ends on Friday, we’re going to enter a Lag Day value of -2. This way, your Q&A booth task will begin before the task prior to it ends.
The Q&A Booth and Conference Dates are linked through dependencies. So, if you have to re-schedule your conference to start a week later than planned, when you move the Conference Date, the Q&A Booth dates will move appropriately to start on the Tuesday of the new week of your conference.
How to Use a Lag Day to Schedule Same-Day Tasks
You can use a similar approach to scheduling same-day tasks in successive order with lag days and dependencies.
Take planning a wedding reception. You have several tasks – setting up tables, arranging chairs, placing centerpieces and table settings – that all have to happen on the same day, in a particular order. You’ve got a team (or small army) helping you get everything done, and before the tables can be decorated, they need to be set up. You can show each of these tasks, along with those responsible for each piece, as interconnected using a -1 lag day.
You can see that Sue knows that before she can decorate the the tables, she needs to have Karin place the tablecloths, but that can’t happen until Jamie first sets up the tables.
For another example of Lag Days in action, check out our post detailing how to create a work-back schedule, super helpful if you’re planning your tasks backwards from a hard deadline.
Til next week, dig in and explore!
- Support Team
When planning a project, it's easy for all the details to slow you down and complicate the process. Simplifying the planning phase of a project can be a real life saver when it comes to keeping your eye on the prize - and get you there quickly and accurately.
Based on the expert insights of Kevin Korterud, originally shared on PMI's Voices on Project Management blog, we have put together a handy slide show to break down three easy steps to improve the efficiency of your next project plan.
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3 Steps to a More Effective Work Plan from Smartsheet
It’s here! A new year and fresh opportunity to set goals for yourself and your team. In a recent survey, we asked some of our customers to share their top goals for 2014. What we found echoed my goals for myself this year: to become more efficient (TVID: 1AF-5D9-9E6). Luckily, Smartsheet is the perfect tool to help turn this goal into a reality.
As you ring in the new year and begin to tackle your goals, here are a few tips and tools to help you become even more productive and efficient in 2014:
Power in numbers: it’s one thing to set goals for yourself, but goals are entirely more powerful when shared with your team. Make sure your team’s priorities and goals for 2014 are outlined in a sheet and shared with everyone – and then use that sheet to track your progress. It’s incredibly motivating to see progress and will encourage your team to keep up the good work.
Check out this template for a goal tracking outline.
We’re all short on time, so when you’re able to get everyone around a table – or phone or computer – to meet, make that time count. By keeping your sheets updated and sharing them with your team, it’s easy for anyone to get a status update on launch progress or hiring updates so you can eliminate wasted time in status meetings.
When you do get together with your team, keep your meetings on track by organizing your agenda in this sheet.
Have you ever found yourself exasperated when you realize that you’re putting in a ton of hours flipping between and coordinating the different tools you use. If you find yourself using multiple tools to keep your team updated or track your progress, there’s never been a better time to pare down than the beginning of the year.
Instead of updating your project plan in your sheet and then drafting an update email to your team, try updating your sheet and then keeping team members in the loop by sending a row or using an update request if action is required. By letting your sheet do the talking, you can avoid email altogether.
Plan out important timelines by going backwards from a hard deadline. Starting with a date and then planning from there breaks down big projects into small chunks that are easy to accomplish. Think of it this way: if you wrote “launch new website” on top of your to-do list, it would probably never get done without a detailed plan.
Make the insurmountable possible by breaking it into smaller pieces and sharing responsibility with your team. Check out this post from our support team to learn how to create your own workback schedule in Smartsheet.
It sounds so simple, but delegating can be challenging if you don’t have each step of a project or process clearly thought out and documented. Once you’ve gotten everything organized in your sheet, be sure to take the next step by sharing with your team, assign responsibility, and setting alerts.
Save time and keep your team on track by automating reminders and you’ll be productively humming along in no time!
I’ll admit it. Once 3 o’clock rolls around, my attention span and ability focus is in danger of succumbing to shiny object syndrome. To help take advantage of the time of day when your brainpower is a little depleted, create a sheet of quick tasks that you can easily check off. You’ll be able to stay productive without giving it a second thought.
Hint: to make this sheet easily accessible, save it to your bookmarks with a secure sheet link. With your 5 minute sheet visible in your browser all the time, you’ll remember that you have it as a resource, even if you’ve gotten distracted by the Huffington Post or sucked into a YouTube vortex.
Make it easy to unplug when you’re done for the day.
Here’s what Kristin Komassa from Colliers International has to say about her team’s vacation time: “I’ve seen my colleagues take their first ‘relaxing’ vacations in years, thanks to Smartsheet. A few years ago, it was just too hard to leave the office – if a crisis emerged with a client and a property, we didn’t have the information on hand to deal with emergencies. Now when a team member goes on vacation and something happens – as it always does, our team knows where to turn to quickly and professionally address whatever may arise.”
Giving yourself a break will help you recharge your batteries, whether it’s during a weeknight or a tropical vacation.
Just think, with all the time you'll save, 2014 has a great shot at being the best year yet!
