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by Brendan Reed on April 24, 2018
Instead of scrolling through rows of data to glean insights, one well-crafted visual can make it easier to understand what’s going on, and help you make decisions more quickly. Charts can highlight outliers, trends, and other details you need to see to make the best choice for your business.
Our most recent additions to Smartsheet dashboards will help you supercharge your data visualization and give you more flexibility in your data sources, so you can get the information you need to make better-informed decisions more quickly. With our charts enhancements, you now have ten new chart variations at your fingertips for more ways to visualize your data in a dashboard. You also have the ability to create charts from reports. Add multiple data sources to one report, then create a chart from that report to bring multiple sources into one visual for a more complete picture. Not only that, but we’ve given you more flexibility on your sheet data structures for charts. Now you can select the specific columns you want to include in a chart, without needing to rearrange your sheet data to include what you want into your chart. Here’s how each of these enhancements work for you and your team to better visualize data:
by Stephen Danos on April 20, 2018
In today’s workplaces, the borders between teams, departments, and roles are blurrier than ever before. “Borderless teams” can be distributed across the globe or just down the hall from one another. They offer increased flexibility, reduced costs, and can be a powerful recruiting tool.
by Brendan Reed on April 19, 2018
Are you wasting time looking for information? A recent infographic shows that information workers spend 36% of their day looking for and consolidating information, and 44% of the time they still can’t find the information they need.
Often, team information is provided manually via email or download, which in turn presents a new set of problems. Constant emailing and chats, the inability to control document versions, and more add up to a painful and ineffective experience. Centralized information and data sources are essential for managing and sharing team documents and data simply and effectively, but existing web-based platforms and company intranets have their limitations. For example, they typically need IT support to set up, which creates a lag time for business users. They can also be difficult to update, so information quickly becomes outdated as business users wait for IT to make changes.
by Stephen Branstetter on February 21, 2018
Earlier this month, we revealed Smartsheet dashboards, an unprecedented bird's-eye view into your business's work in Smartsheet. With dashboards, you have a customizable, powerful tool that arms you with real-time data and information for making the best decisions. Let’s look at some best practices for getting started with dashboards so you can improve your work right away.
Preparing Your Information for Dashboards
Before you start building a dashboard, there are three factors you must determine.
by Stephen Danos on April 9, 2018
Teams tend to stick together, whether they work for a Fortune 100 company or a 50-person startup. After all, these colleagues often work toward similar goals and team boundaries are sometimes needed to keep things streamlined for meeting deadlines, and for nurturing camaraderie between teammates.
However, the “silo mentality” holds teams back in several ways. Team silos can result in a sense of tribalism and undermine the spirit of collaboration, running the risk of disrupting a company’s ability to innovate and stay aligned. Here are some of the ways silos can hurt your business and what you and your teams can do to avoid them.
by Katy Beloof on January 26, 2018
To stay competitive in today’s rapidly changing business world, companies need to make better decisions faster. To do so, senior business leaders must rethink how their teams get work done.
A recent study by 451 Research takes an in-depth look at the changing nature of work, the limits of traditional tools, and how business leaders can adapt going forward. It proposes a new paradigm for work management that gives businesses the ability to balance structure and flexibility to gain a competitive edge. Complex, Strategic Work Has Become Everyone’s Job
Business leaders and their teams are taking on complex work in unprecedented ways. Work that used to fall to specialists, analysts, and process experts is being decentralized and becoming the responsibility of everyone on the team. Business leaders are having to learn how to help their teams manage strategic work processes to achieve business outcomes.
So what does this decentralization of complex and specialist work look like on the ground?
Complex work is being decentralized across all departments and industries. And these aren’t small, one-off projects. Nearly half (46%) of the business leaders surveyed reported that it’s standard for them to supervise more than 200 distinct stages of a given project, and 75% report that it’s typical for more than 100 people to be involved over the duration of a project.
by Stephen Danos on April 5, 2018
In the past, we’ve looked at how automation improves employee engagement and surveyed information workers for our 2017 Automation Report. The report showed that there are three key processes — data collection, approvals, and updates — that, when automated, give people more time to focus on high-value work.
But automation doesn’t just free up time for workers. It can also improve visibility and create accountability across an organization. By giving teams access to the same information across the board — a single source of truth to work from — they can more quickly move forward on projects. Clearer Communication
While communication tools such as email, instant messaging applications, and team collaboration software have their uses, information often gets lost in the shuffle. Sifting through messages and status updates across multiple platforms is not only a tedious process, but it creates knowledge gaps.
Teams can’t quickly and effectively communicate changes to projects or processes when information is siloed. There’s no single source of truth, making it difficult to move work forward. Using a work management platform that automates time-consuming, manual tasks makes a noticeable difference. For example, instead of wasting time racing around the office gathering metric reports from stakeholders or sending status update emails, workers can set up automated update requests to gather the information they need to get projects done. Then, that information is consolidated in one place for anyone on the project to reference.
by Joosung Nam on February 13, 2018
Even when you and your teams use Smartsheet to manage and track your work, making sure that real-time information is accessible and actionable to all stakeholders can be challenging. The level of detail that an individual contributor needs in their sheet to get work done is at once too much and not enough data for the executive level. You need to make the right information available at the right time to the right people to help them make better decisions and quickly act on data.
That’s why we’re excited to announce Smartsheet’s new dashboards (previously known as Sights™) to go along with Smartsheet’s updated look and feel. In addition to all of the capabilities you have had with Sights up until today, we’ve added the ability to create charts based on your Smartsheet data to our dashboards. While you need a Business or Enterprise license to create and edit dashboards, anyone can access dashboards that are shared with them or published, whether or not they have a Smartsheet license.
by Katy Beloof on April 3, 2018
Being a leader in an organization means that you get to make the calls on big decisions. But often executives are insulated from day-to-day operations, a distance which can compromise effective decision making. Without firsthand or detailed information about a situation, executive isolation leads to disconnected organizations, misalignment across teams, and flawed business decisions. So how can you be sure that you’re making the best possible decisions for your business?
The good news is there are simple strategies that curb isolation and help you get the perspective you need to make better decisions without slowing down. Here’s a look at three ways to get the information you need to make better-informed decisions. 
by Katy Beloof on March 28, 2018
Businesses today need to move quickly to stay competitive. Yet disconnected information often slows down workers and costs organizations in terms of time and opportunity lost.
Workers spend 36% of their workday looking for and consolidating information. Much of the time, they still can’t find the information needed to do their best work quickly. Information spread across email, chat, slide decks, docs, and spreadsheets is disconnected and isolated from the work that needs to be done. This often leads to data that’s inaccessible and out of date. When workers are able to track down the data they need, they often spend a lot of time creating slide decks — and up to 87% of that time is spent on design, not on data. Our infographic looks at the amount of time your organization wastes due to siloed information, and what you can do about it. Take a look: |
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