Smartsheet Consultant: Benefits, Skills, Services
Organizations that adopt Smartsheet can realize powerful benefits including increased efficiency and productivity, as well as improved communication and collaboration between teams. But when Smartsheet is not optimized and tailored to fit your team’s needs, you may struggle to realize these outcomes.
Oftentimes, it is helpful to turn to the expertise of a Smartsheet consultant to capitalize on opportunities, address issues, and unlock the full value of the platform.
Things to know about Smartsheet consultants:
- What is Smartsheet?
- Benefits of Smartsheet
- What Does a Smartsheet Consultant Do?
- Responsibilities & Skills of a Smartsheet Consultant
- When Should You Hire a Smartsheet Consultant?
- 9 Ways Smartsheet Consultants Can Help Your Business
What is Smartsheet?
Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-centric, cloud-based project management and collaborative work management platform that enables business teams to plan, track, manage, automate, report, and deliver their projects, as well as streamline work processes and improve team communication to achieve goals more efficiently.
Benefits of Smartsheet
Features that provide Smartsheet an edge over the competition include:
- Ability to drive efficiencies at scale by leveraging Smartsheet Control Center (SCC) in a Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution to reduce administrative burden and increase transparency
- One version of the truth, and one place to go to for information (instead of consulting numerous spreadsheets and emails to track down project status and details)
- Real-time visibility on all of your team’s projects with roll-up reports and dashboards
- Improved collaboration and communication
- Cleaner data and tracking, with removal of duplicate data entry points
- Enhanced productivity – less time spent on planning, and more time on doing
- Automation opportunities to increase efficiency and speed
- Ability to assign tasks and schedule and plan projects quickly and easily
What Does a Smartsheet Consultant Do?
A Smartsheet consultant begins by assessing your processes, team, and company, determining strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. They then partner with your team to strategize and structure your Smartsheet solution, using best practices to optimize your solution for your specific needs.
A Smartsheet consultant is skilled at identifying various areas within your organization that can benefit from your Smartsheet investment and creating multiple solutions for various departments. These solutions can include mergers & acquisitions (M&A), project management, and resource management, using products like Control Center and the Smartsheet for Salesforce Connector.
During and following implementation, a Smartsheet consultant will work with your team to manage and optimize your Smartsheet environment. They will also provide training for your team’s key users to support adoption and ensure you see the full return on your investment.
Smartsheet consultants may also optimize your existing Smartsheet environment, identifying new opportunities for optimization and automation to improve workflows, visibility, efficiency, communication, and collaboration.
Responsibilities & Skills of Smartsheet Consultants
- Evaluating Smartsheet functionality against client business needs
- Roadmapping client’s Smartsheet journey and providing realistic expectations on cost, timing, and success factors
- Designing and developing customized Smartsheet templates, dashboards, reports, and workflows
- Identifying opportunities to use Smartsheet across departments, creating multiple solutions
- Using products like Data Shuttle, DataMesh and Dynamic View to further enhance your Smartsheet solution
- Integrating Smartsheet with existing business systems
- Business process re-engineering
- Providing guidance and training for change and project management
- Assessing and addressing any risks and roadblocks during adoption and optimization
When Should You Hire a Smartsheet Consultant?
If your organization is considering Smartsheet adoption, hiring a consultant from the get-go is essential for success. While Smartsheet’s core product functionality delivers a no-code experience, to get the most out of the tool, extensive training and/or practical application is required.
A consultant provides guidance, direction, and support to ensure your business is successful with its Smartsheet investment. They bring the expertise, knowledge of best practices, and business and technology skills you need to adopt, manage, automate, and optimize your Smartsheet solution.
Engaging with a Smartsheet consultant is also beneficial if you already have Smartsheet but need assistance optimizing it. This is applicable when your business workflows are inefficient or could be automated, you’re manually entering data into multiple systems, your people are having difficulty finding the information they need, or you need more real-time visibility.
If you have an existing Smartsheet iteration, the deep expertise of a consultant can help your teams use it to the fullest potential. The support of a Smartsheet consultant also proves beneficial if your organization is experiencing a period of rapid change, such as M&A activities.
9 Ways Smartsheet Consultants Can Help Your Business
- Making your organization’s data accessible across teams and departments
- Creating insightful dashboarding and reporting to track and view your team’s projects and results
- Creating solutions across multiple departments for various business needs, such as employee onboarding/offboarding, marketing/creative campaign approval workflows, management, and mergers & acquisitions.
- Consolidating your data and project information in a central location, removing duplicate data entry points and enhancing data visibility and accuracy
- Creating automated workflows to reduce manual processes and administrative burden, free up resources, and, increase efficiency and team productivity
- Providing customized integrations to connect Smartsheet with your current business systems, such as Power BI, CRM, and Finance, to streamline operations and optimize your solution
- Improving the flow of communication and collaboration within your teams and your organization
- Saving you time and expenses while achieving maximum value for your Smartsheet implementation
- Providing training, change management, and post-deployment support to ensure your change is sustained and the full value of your Smartsheet investment is realized
How We Help With Smartsheet Optimization
As a Smartsheet Certified Partner, we provide Smartsheet training and extensive experience, freeing up your organization’s valuable resources and enabling you to realize speed to value quicker than if you implemented Smartsheet on your own.
Our experts at ArcLight provide a wide range of end-to-end Smartsheet services for organizations of all sizes to overcome their business challenges by enabling online collaboration, process automation, operational visibility, and systems and data integrations.
We do not simply achieve business improvement results for our clients; we do it better, smarter, and in less time than the competition.
