Think about your current project system and see how many questions you can answer with a 'yes':

Can all of your employees point to your current project list?
Can all of your staff look at one master schedule and see what projects have milestones due next week?
When looking at your master schedule can you click on a project and be taken the to the individual task list for the project?
Do your individual project schedules automatically feed into a master schedule?
Send automated emails to every staff member with their upcoming tasks for the week?
Can you look at a dashboard that tells you how many projects the company is working on and how many are on hold?
Are you able to track active proposals and calculate your hit rate from the same dashboard?
Is there one dashboard that a new employee could look at that tells them current projects, master project schedule, links to Standard Operating Procedures, and contains a customized task list per employee
Are you able to assign an employee a task in an individual project sheet and pull a report across all projects for tasks specific to that employee?

If you weren’t able to answer yes to all of these questions then let me show you how Smartsheet could save you time, money, and frustration.

Before using Smartsheet I had to open numerous spreadsheets in different locations to answer the following questions:

1.What projects are current?
2.What tasks are employees responsible for
3.Where’s the contact list?
4.Where are files stored?
5.What are the SOPs?
6.Is the work equally distributed or is someone over or under loaded?
7.What consultants are on which projects?
8.Are we making money on this job?
9.What’s our proposal hit rate?
10.What would 1% improvement look like^
11.What projects need to be invoiced^

There is a cost of inefficient and non-integrated systems with multiple silos of redundant data…

While most of us would like to think we're saving money by using cheap or free softwares there is a time and mental engery cost associated with having to switch and navigate between multiple different programs. Figure out how much time you're spending on your Frankenstein system and multiply that by your billable rate. How much would you save if you invested in a software?

Why Smartsheet?

I've looked at BQE Core, Mavenlink, and Frank - which are all project management softwares for architects by architects. However, there are two things that have held me back - price and user interface.

We're a typical small office (less than 9 people) but we have remote workers who need access to everything. The downside of many of these systems is that you're paying by the module (time sheet, accounting, invoices, etc.) which means in a small firm we're paying additional fees for the same person.

Our team spans generations and we needed a software that was easy for even our most technologically challenged team members to jump on board.

For better or worse many firms still use Excel to track metrics. Smartsheet is like an interconnected excel on steroids so it's familiar to the user but much more enhanced.

It's a cloud-based database that is fully customizeable.

No more redundant spreadsheets

"All of the principals have their own contact spreadsheet. I spend at least 5 hours every month consolidating their spreadsheets back into a master list."

- Marketing Personnel at a well known DC area firm

5 hours every month! That's 60 hours a year worth of redundant work updating spreadsheets that Smartsheet could handle. This is a process problem.

I use to think it was just the small firms not having access to the