Smartsheet Control Center: Automating Multiple Portfolios at Scale
Adrien Leduc
How Control Center Works (Without the Headache)
At its core, Control Center creates new items from templates and automatically provisions them when a new request is submitted through an intake sheet.
Here’s how it works in practice:
1. Intake: where everything starts
A new request lands on your intake sheet. This can happen via a form, or (especially for projects) through the Smartsheet Salesforce Connector. You could do this through an API as well.
You can choose to trigger provisioning immediately, or only after an approval step. This gives you flexibility depending on how controlled your process needs to be.
2. Provisioning: turning requests into structured work
Once approved, Control Center provisions a workspace or folder using your pre-built templates.
These templates can include anything you’ve set up in advance:
- Sheets
- Reports
- Dashboards
The powerful part is that the data captured in your intake sheet is automatically pushed into the newly created assets. This ensures consistency and removes manual setup work.
3. Portfolio tracking: keeping everything visible
After provisioning, Control Center can automatically add a row to a separate sheet, commonly called a summary sheet.
In simple terms:
- Each provisioned project = one row in the summary sheet
- Intake sheet = all requests (both processed and unprocessed)
Your summary sheet becomes a high-level portfolio view. However, for operational teams, it’s often better to use reports of the summary sheet so each team only sees the columns relevant to them.
4. Archiving: closing the loop
When projects are completed, Control Center can archive them.
This step isn’t fully automatic, but it’s quick, you typically just need a couple of clicks. Most teams handle archiving on a weekly basis.
What to Watch Out For
Control Center is extremely powerful, but setting it up can feel overwhelming at first.
A successful setup requires:
- Well-structured templates (sheets, reports, dashboards)
- A properly configured intake sheet
- Careful configuration of Control Center settings (some of which aren’t very obvious)
In short: the tool works brilliantly but only if everything is set up correctly from the start.
Do you need help getting started?
If you have access to Control Center and want to automate your project creation but aren’t sure where to begin, I can help you design and build the whole setup.
