How to Use Smartsheet for Project Management

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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.

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
Using 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.

Pre-built Templates
via Smartsheet
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.

Allows flexible project planning
With Grid View, Gantt View, Card View similar to a Kanban board, and Calendar denmark telemarketing data 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.

Ensures real-time collaboration and communication
via Smartsheet
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.

Enables time tracking and resource management
via Smartsheet
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.