Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Tweet

Mail

Back in February I posted that I was making use of Smartsheet to support a major change programme, in particular between suppliers, whilst at the same time the newly recruited IT Director was championing the internal use of Basecamp internally.

I promised to provide regular updates, so here is the first one all be it a little later than planned!

1. From my perspective the user interface for Smartsheet is a great deal more intuitive and tidy than for Basecamp.
2. Smartsheet is being successfully utilised between three other suppliers in support of basic bug tracking, issues log, document sharing (with version control).
3. I am particularly keen on the facility in Smartsheet to import Microsoft Project Plans (from suppliers) into a template that is easy to manipulate, sanitise and summarise into something digestible at executive client level, in particular where there are multiple supplier MPPs.
4. For exception reporting I utilise Smartsheet to produce a RAG report each week to the Directors, the easy visualisation of most recent changes is a useful feature.
5. Other valuable features include the ease of export to Excel or PDF, messaging, pre canned templates, update requests for shared files, easy email integration and a useful overnight update of changes made.
6. Internally Basecamp is being used to distribute documents against major workstreams in the programme and most usefully to set events and milestones as alerts to participants in the Project.

I am becoming quite a fan of Smartsheet as we move into true development phases on CRM, Membership and Website workstreams I expect to increase its utilisation. I will write a little more about Basecamp next time.