Replacement Plan in Smartsheet

Our leadership is looking at better documentation around Replacement Planning and while we have a lot of the data in existing Smartsheets, I need to work with others to better communicate that data.

Ultimately, we want to share who’s working on what project and who others can go to for “leadership” and “project” backups in the event that the principle is unavailable. In this time of COVID-19, we have determined that it may be necessary to document up to three backup tiers for each project.

Initially, the difference between a “leadership” and “project” backup needed to be defined. Someone identified to provide leadership backup would be expected to know how to get answers related to a specific project but they themselves may be unable to complete the work or task. The person identified as a project backup would be able to accomplish the work that would yield answers to those questions.

The next big hurdle was to determine how to combine information from at least three different Smartsheets and using the Dashboard feature, we will be able to combine that information. We’re starting off with one sheet as the master that will establish the basic style (column names and widths) for the data. A second sheet was edited by changing some of the existing column names and adding new ones. A third sheet is going to prove more difficult. We need to preserve the original column names and will not be able to add more columns to that existing sheet as we had done in the second sheet.

I have decided to create a secondary sheet that pulls in that information using index and match functions and then other formulae to remap that data into columns that we are using in the other two sheets.

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