Smartsheet Implementation — Operations & Project Management Leadership
Operational Challenge
Rapid growth exposed a lack of standardized project tracking across administration, design, production, and installation teams. Work was managed through disconnected folders, informal updates, and tribal knowledge, limiting schedule reliability, accountability, and leadership visibility into capacity and risk.
Role & Ownership
I served as the operational project owner, responsible for designing, implementing, and operationalizing a centralized project management system using Smartsheet. This included cross-functional alignment, workflow design, rollout execution, and team training.
Operational Approach
I treated Smartsheet not as a task tracker, but as an operational control system.
My approach focused on:
Mapping real-world workflows across departments to identify handoffs, dependencies, and failure points
Translating those workflows into standardized, repeatable Smartsheet project templates
Defining clear ownership, status definitions, and escalation paths
Creating automated alerts and updates to reduce manual coordination overhead
Each department maintained visibility into their own work while contributing to a unified, end-to-end project view.
Execution & Governance
To ensure adoption and sustainability, I:
Built role-specific workflows for admin, design, production, and installation teams
Established update cadences and accountability standards
Developed leadership dashboards to track project status, workload, and risk in real time
Acted as system administrator and continuous-improvement lead, refining the system based on operational feedback
Training & Change Management
I led hands-on training sessions focused on operational outcomes—not just tool usage. Teams were trained on:
How Smartsheet connected their work to downstream teams
How accurate updates reduced rework and scheduling conflicts
How the system supported leadership decision-making
This change-management approach drove buy-in and consistent usage across departments.
Operational Impact
Created a single source of truth for all active projects
Improved schedule reliability and cross-team handoffs
Enabled leadership to see capacity constraints and bottlenecks early
Established a scalable PM framework that supported growth without increasing coordination overhead
This initiative shifted project management from reactive coordination to proactive operational control.
