Tag: project management

Smartsheet for Task and Project Management

I recently started to use Smartsheet for helping to manage my tasks, duties, and projects. I found an existing template from them and am using it pretty much as-is. Our college has been using Smartsheet for a couple of years now and it’s been very good overall.

My template features a pretty standard array of fields:

  • Task
  • Category
  • Status
  • WBS No.
  • Assigned to
  • Start Date
  • End Date
  • Duration
  • % Done
  • Comments
  • Predecessors
  • and the standard Smartsheets Conversations (comments), Attachments, etc.

This tool replaces what I had been doing previously. Not long after the start of COVID, I was overwhelmed with work. I don’t mind juggling, but I didn’t even know what I was juggling at that point. My previous system wasn’t working for me so I switched to using hidden, free blocks on an alternate, private Outlook calendar. This helped me to block off time for what I needed to do without cluttering up my main calendar which is shared.

Back to Smartsheet, I’m still able to get a good view of what I need to do and manage everything decently. I’m a visual person, so I’m mostly missing out on the graphical view of a calendar with blocks for time to work on projects. That’s been OK so far. I do have the Gantt feature for larger projects, but I still don’t use that view much. It’s mostly useful for the dates.

Last post of 2020 and You Say, “Tomato,” I Say “Pomodoro”

COVID Pandemic–what a year and what a year to come. Right now globally, we’re looking at the highest infection and death rates that we’ve ever seen. I hope humanity can try to agree on protecting one another from this horrible pandemic.

I close out 2020 with something new. Perhaps the start of a New Year’s Resolution of sorts. I’m going to try out the Pomodoro technique to work more effectively. Meetings often drive the structure of my work day. That could make it difficult to complete multiple Pomodoro’s back-to-back, but I’m not really concerned about that. I plan to use this technique on whatever time I have.

I’ve only just start using it and can see how it will improve my ability to focus, manage stress, and get more done. I already have a timer that I’ve customized for work and break sessions. I’ll return to share how this has impacted my work.

Until then, happy holidays to you and best wishes.

Google Tasks to the Rescue!

I’ve switched all of my tasks over to Google Tasks and everything is already better. Things are starting to get really busy preparing for FA20 and I was feeling stressed out and behind. Having all my tasks somewhere I can manage them definitely helps with my stress levels.

Now I can access/edit my tasks from my laptop, mobile devices, etc. Before, I was using MS Outlook Tasks and that was horrible. I would continually having syncing errors and lost a lot of content after a recent sync. Office365 has been a real disappointment in general. Before that, I was very happy with Apple Reminders, but was very disappointed that when they updated Reminders with Catalina, I lost the ability to access/edit my tasks via online iCloud and non-Catalina machines (not including mobile devices).

I was going to move all my tasks to Smartsheet, but looking through a spreadsheet for your tasks is a horrible experience and while it can handle this kind of data, it’s definitely not the best tool for task management for me.

Google Tasks isn’t as detailed as Outlook and that’s better for me actually. I’m going to keep track of how well it helps me, but so far so good!

Looks like I can even export my tasks using Google Tasks Desktop. I hope that works because that wasn’t something I could do with Outlook or Apple Reminders.

Smartsheet: Index, Match, @Row

I am trying to build out a new process using Smartsheet and was just recommended by Laura Adams to consider using Index & Match instead of VLookup because it requires less resources, makes it easier to reproduce, and is more secure.

index, match vs. vlookup

How to build an Index-Match formula

Example

Let’s say you had a simple sheet that listed the faculty contact for any given course. In another sheet, you would like to pull that information in and you can as long as you have a cell with the same course information. This allows you to have a number of smaller source sheets that contain useful information that needs to be referenced in a number of other sheets.

You would set up your index-match function by:

  1. identifying (referencing) the column in the source sheet with the names of the faculty
  2. identifying the column in the destination sheet that contains the course information for each of the faculty
  3. identifying the column in the source sheet that contains the course information you are matching to

I’ve created some public sheets which anyone should be able to view to see this very simple example of index-match at work:

It is easy to get confused what gets referenced where in the formula.

Laura’s example above includes an IFERROR function that helps to turn “#NO MATCH” errors into either blanks or some other more useful, human-friendly message.

Some additional resources:

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Project Management Methods in Course Design

Some interesting ideas around PM. Most useful were some new concepts related to ranking stakeholders – not something that was particularly useful to me in the past, but there was interesting questions around how the ranking of stakeholders would impact the project plan. Thankfully, our office has many of these practices in place, but of course we can always refine and improve. I think one initial area would be improving standardization around scope documents.

  • Common tools
    • Stakeholder management
    • MOU; use a change order if one of the stakeholders changes the scope of  work
    • Project Plan (Gantt Chart)
  • Getting Organized and Staying on Track
    • Chart with Major/minor tasks, dates, assignees
    • Keep it as simple as possible
  • Top 5 Stakeholders
    • A = allies, B = non-allies
    • R = resistant, in-between A and B
    • up-down axis = I(nterest) vs. P(ower)
  • Engage
    • Purpose is to develop an online version of 402 HIT