What is Smartsheet Control Center?

Smartsheet Control Center

Smartsheet Control Center is a portfolio and project management solution that delivers consistent, visible projects and business processes at scale. Control Center helps you establish organizational best practices for work execution and reporting and build them into every project quickly and easily.

Program leads start by defining a common project or process template set with sheets, reports, and dashboards. This common project type is called a “Blueprint.” Smartsheet Control Center automates the creation of new projects modelled after this blueprint to build in best practices and common metrics that roll up to portfolio level visibility.

Who is Smartsheet Control Centre for?

If you have a process that you consistently use, time and time again, and really want to scale the process, read below. We find that of you are repeating the process 15-20 times per year or more, there could be major benefits both in time & quality. The 3 key benefits of Smartsheet Control Centre are:

  • Set up projects consistently & quickly
  • Provide visibility of progress to the Exec and various teams quickly
  • The ability to scale your projects seamlessly, via Intake / Demand Planning, global updates (update all live projects at the same time), archiving etc

Do you really need it?

That’s totally your choice and there are ways to scale projects without Control Centre. When you set your project blueprint up, you can simply save project as a new name, without Control Centre. The drawback is that you will have to:

  • manually rename all sheets, reports & dashboards
  • manually create all the links to the blueprint summary (and trust me, you will make a mistake at some stage)
  • if you want to make changes, you will have to make changes to every project manually – from experience this is time consuming and frustrating.

A quick overview of Smartsheet Control Center is visible in the video or paragraph below.

1. Demand Management
Manage project requests, approval, and creation from Control Center through a standard intake process.

2. Project set up
New projects can launch in a shared portfolio workspace or in their own new workspaces, each with their own permissions and access controls.

3. Roll up summary – known as Blueprint summary
Each new project in a Control Center program is automatically configured to feed key program metrics into portfolio level reports and dashboards. Now it’s easier to make data-driven decisions about things like program budget, resources, and risk. When requirements evolve, your process can adapt to collect new metrics or track new tasks.

4. Update projects with Global updates
Control Center can push updates to all sheets, reports, and dashboards within the portfolio in a fraction of the time it would take to make those changes manually.

5. Archive projects
Archive completed projects and retain historical data for trend analysis and compliance.

6. Multi-tier Control Centre
Multi-tier program structure allows for a hierarchy of projects with cascading permissions and reporting to segment projects among teams, regions, or customers while retaining program-level visibility and control.

Smartsheet Control Centre summary
Drive consistency and visibility at scale to save money, hours, and errors with Smartsheet Control Center, with the ability to update all projects easily.

Smartsheet Control Center consultancy

Cheetah Transformation has implemented a number of Smartsheet Control Center solutions with leading clients. Rob Eberstein has been trained by the creators of Smartsheet Control Center in Bellevue. Cheetah Transformation Smartsheet consultants have been through training with Smartsheet, so can offer you a fantastic service at great value. Cheetah Transformation is Smartsheet Professional Services certified, so you can be confident in the quality of solutions we build.

How long does it take to implement a Smartsheet Control Centre solution?
From our experience, on average it takes between 10-15 days solid work to implement a smartsheet Control Center solution. There is no golden rule. Sometimes it’s quicker, sometimes it’s longer, all depending on your requirements.

Control center solutions built by Cheetah Transformation

  • Go to Market – tracking the progress and success of selling products to market, alongside the business case, and forecasted revenues
  • New Product Development – moving the products along the NPD lifecycle (scoping, business case, implementation, launch & review) to ensure successful launches
  • Advertising Campaigns – tracking the creation of advertising assets & campaigns, and highlighting progress to clients
  • Video productions campaigns – managing the process of bidding for and producing videos
  • Event management – managing the process for bidding for events and executing those events once won
  • IT Projects – managing the intake and implementation of IT projects

Smarsheet Control Center training

Cheetah Transformation runs a range of Smartsheet training courses. We run a course specifically on Smartsheet Control Center. If you want to really unerstand how to create Blueprints, configure in Smartsheet Control Centre, please contact us.

To learn more about Smartsheet Control Center and how Cheetah Transformation can help implement your solution, please get in touch.