Workforce Management Featured Article
Smartsheet Work Management Seeks to Show How Businesses Operate
There is a lot of focus on business technologies that can improve employee collaboration. One segment of that technology that is rarely discussed, however, is the visual side of things. How exactly does one, as a manager or project coordinator, see collaboration taking shape?
Smartsheet, a collaborative work management company, is working to answer that very question with its flagship software of the same name. A news brief at Beta News says the software allows managers to view how employees collaborate around work processes instead of just showing organizational charts, and that is just from a macro level. On the micro level—for individual employees—the software can show individual reports that focus on personal tasks and how they relate to overall group project progress. Mark Mader, president and CEO of Smartsheet, compares the software to the automobile market and hints that Smartsheet is a class above the rest.
"We're delivering the only comprehensive work visualization tool on the market," Mader said. "An enterprise can clearly see who's working with whom, what they are working on, and the content related to that work. The next closest thing from any vendor is a Prius compared to our Tesla."
What is most visually appealing about Smartsheet is its ability to show an enterprise-wide view of all user processes taking place at once. The map looks like a top-down view of a city. Clusters of groups show employees working on specific projects, and a grid on its right-hand side shows usage statistics such as the number of employees collaborating on Smartsheet and the number of discussions taking place at any given time.
Individual employees and collaborative teams can see their own work represented in Gantt charts, calendar views, and grids that show progress on tasks. Smartsheet's sorting algorithm also considers external contributors such as vendors and business partners that will use the software to help manage their work. The software intends to keep employees accountable for the work they are scheduled to complete. Through sharing of tasks among teams, it can also help team leaders delegate who should be completing any task at a specified stage of a project. Through Smartsheet, relationships between individuals become visible; furthermore, relationships between groups also become visible. It shows the entire relational aspect of an organization in order for businesses to see, not just in numbers, how they are functioning in real time.
Edited by Maurice Nagle