How do you assign people to projects effectively, while staying flexible when things get cancelled or put on hold? Any PMO or operations team runs into this question once they start scaling, and Smartsheet Resource Management is one of the tools built to help answer it.
Resource Management is a separate app in the Smartsheet ecosystem that links to your project sheets. If you already have it, you likely also have Smartsheet Control Center, and I'd recommend getting familiar with Control Center first, since the two connect and some setup decisions affect both: Smartsheet Control Center: Automating Multiple Portfolios at Scale.
Here's the theory. In your project plan sheets, you add a % Allocation column, mapped in Project Settings, which tells Resource Management how much of a person's time each task takes, 50% for the week, 100% for two days, whatever fits the task. It's calculated against the start and end dates, and sent through to Resource Management along with whoever is assigned on each row. You can calculate this automatically, for example "2 hours out of an 8 hour day", by entering a formula in each cell of the Allocation % column. You can't use Smartsheet's "Convert to Column Formula" option on that column: it breaks the Control Center connection. A formula entered cell by cell, even if it's the same formula copied down the whole column, is not the same thing and won't cause issues.
Once that's set up, Resource Management shows you everyone's schedule, so you can start making real decisions about who's assigned where.
That's the theory, and it sounds simple. In practice, there are three levels of detail you can implement, and a few governance models to go with them, otherwise this turns into chaos fast.
This fits organisations where projects are staffed by a small, fairly stable group of people working full time or half time on projects. A master sheet, or one sheet per Control Center template, structured as:
At this level, I'd recommend either a single point of contact handling assignments, or leaving it to individual managers, depending on how your organisation is structured and the volume.
If you already run a Service Matrix, a sheet used to scope and price services for clients, you can extend it with assignments and date columns. This lets you assign people to services as they're sold, which is more precise than assigning at the whole-project level.
This is a good middle ground and fits a lot of organisations. You can manage assignments the same way as in the project-level approach above, though at some point having a single person own assignments across all services tends to work better, since they get visibility across every team.
One catch: dates often need to be updated in both the project plan and the Service Matrix, which means some double entry for the project manager. That leads to the third method.
This is the most granular option, and also the hardest to keep under control. You could add the Allocation % column to every project plan and hand it to your project managers, but in my experience, unless every PM is well trained and consistently engaged (rarely realistic across a whole team and organisation), mistakes creep in and break the assignment logic.
From there, a few approaches exist, each with its own setup and maintenance cost.
a. Project plan built from the Service Matrix. The project plan mirrors the Service Matrix, built around the services sold. You keep control over resourcing, but project managers tend to dislike losing control over their own plan, and keeping both sheets aligned as services change takes ongoing maintenance.
b. Project plan for assignees, not for the PM. One way to simplify option (a) is to leave the project manager out of the allocation logic entirely. PMs rarely work a flat, predictable number of hours on a project week to week, phases and unexpected issues shift that constantly, so removing them from the equation can make the rest of the setup considerably easier to maintain.
c. PM-managed, Resource Manager-overseen. Here, project managers keep control of their own project plan, but within clear limits. Automated columns flag anything "out of bounds," triggering a Smartsheet automation that notifies the Resource Manager, who follows up daily through reports and a dashboard.
There's no one-size-fits-all answer here. If you'd like help figuring out what fits your team, get in touch through the contact form below and we'll work through it together.
Otherwise, see how this looked in practice in this case study: How We Streamlined Project Assignment and Resource Allocation.