5 Project Management Formulas to Leverage in Smartsheet
When it to comes to project management, efficiency and organization are crucial to ensure successful project delivery. To streamline and optimize your project workflows in Smartsheet, leveraging the right formulas can be a game-changer. In this blog post, we will explore five essential project management formulas that can help you harness the full potential of Smartsheet: ANCESTORS, CHILDREN, PARENT, ISCRITICAL, and NETWORKDAYS.
1. ANCESTORS Formula
In project management systems, tasks are often interdependent and organized in hierarchical structures. The ANCESTORS formula in Smartsheet enables you to traverse upwards in this hierarchy, providing you with valuable insights into a task's lineage and dependencies.
When planning complex projects, understanding the ancestors of a specific task is crucial for identifying its dependencies and potential bottlenecks. By applying the ANCESTORS formula, you can access essential information about the parent tasks or even grandparent tasks, allowing you to track the progress and implications of each activity.
2. CHILDREN Formula
Just as the ANCESTORS formula allows you to explore tasks' dependencies upwards in the hierarchy, the CHILDREN formula empowers you to delve deeper into the tasks' subordinate elements. This formula is instrumental in obtaining a comprehensive overview of all the subtasks associated with a specific parent task.
By leveraging the CHILDREN formula in Smartsheet, project managers can monitor the status of each subtask and gauge their collective impact on the overall project timeline. This knowledge can be leveraged to make informed decisions and effectively allocate resources for task completion.
3. PARENT Formula
As the backbone of project management, the PARENT formula allows you to identify the parent task of a given subtask within your project. By doing so, you can efficiently track and manage the relationships between tasks and their corresponding parent tasks.
The PARENT formula's insights offer a holistic perspective, enabling you to understand how changes to a subtask might impact its parent task and, consequently, the overall project. This feature proves especially valuable when managing large-scale projects with multiple interconnected tasks.
4. ISCRITICAL Formula
In any project, certain tasks are more critical than others in determining the project's overall timeline. The ISCRITICAL formula in Smartsheet evaluates each task's criticality based on its dependencies and the effect any delays might have on the project's completion date.
By identifying critical tasks using the ISCRITICAL formula, project managers can focus their efforts on ensuring these activities stay on track, reducing the risk of project delays. This knowledge can guide project managers in prioritizing resources and allocating them effectively to meet crucial deadlines.
5. NETWORKDAYS Formula
Project timelines are often constrained by external factors like weekends, holidays, and non-working hours. The NETWORKDAYS formula in Smartsheet calculates the number of working days between two specified dates, taking into account the non-working days.
This formula is immensely beneficial for establishing realistic project timelines and managing expectations. By incorporating NETWORKDAYS into your Smartsheet workflows, you can accurately estimate project durations, set milestones, and communicate feasible deadlines to stakeholders.
Smartsheet Project Management Formulas to Improve Your Workflow
Smartsheet's ANCESTORS, CHILDREN, PARENT, ISCRITICAL, and NETWORKDAYS formulas offer project managers powerful tools to enhance project visibility, optimize task dependencies, prioritize critical activities, and plan realistic timelines. By leveraging these formulas, you can transform your project management approach, resulting in better control, improved decision-making, and successful project outcomes.
Smartsheet Project Management Solutions from CloudWave
If you’re considering Smartsheet for project management and data analysis, look for a Smartsheet Platinum Partner like CloudWave who understands the technology best practices and prioritizes your unique business needs.
Through Smartsheet integration, we deliver cross-platform functionality that helps you bring your system together for an end-to-end solution within Smartsheet. Using automation, we reduce tedious manual processes to save time and improve productivity.
CloudWave also provides Smartsheet support throughout the entire project lifecycle - defining scope, architecture, design, development and deployment. As your data environment constantly changes, we offer continued support beyond the project in an ever-shifting digital landscape.