by Staff Writer When it comes to working remotely, 16th-century poet John Donne may have said it best: “No man is an island entire of itself …”
Yet too often, remote workers exist on virtual islands, cut off from the day-to-day rhythm of business and one step removed from the company and team goals. This experience can be isolating for employees— and costly for business. by Staff Writer Just because something is ubiquitous doesn’t mean it’s the better way. There are countless examples of products and tools that though popular simply don’t deliver on their promise. And within businesses of all sizes, one of the biggest culprits is spreadsheets.
Though a majority of businesses use spreadsheets in various capacities, these tools are often used by default without anyone giving serious consideration to the benefits or costs they offer compared to other solutions. In the drive to improve efficiency and cost effectiveness that’s slowly starting to change: one report focused on finance and accounting professionals, for example, found that Excel usage for budgeting and planning purposes dropped six percentage points from 2017 to 2018, to 63 percent. This suggests that many businesses have yet to evaluate the hidden productivity toll and other costs of managing work in spreadsheets. Here are seven ways that using spreadsheets to manage tasks and projects can cost your business. by Renee Coulombe In order to help you work more efficiently, Smartsheet has four views that enable you to see and work with your data in different ways. These views help provide project clarity and visibility and let you work using your preferred way to visualize information related to your projects and processes.
Grid view, the standard view you see when setting up your sheets, displays your data in a spreadsheet format. This view is a great place to start when setting up project information and task requirements. However, exploring the three other views in Smartsheet can help you see your data in new ways, quickly visualize timelines, and organize tasks into actionable groups. Learn how card view, Gantt view, and calendar view enable you to take your sheets to the next level, expand your view, and help you work more effectively: by Praerit Garg I recently joined Smartsheet as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, and it’s the opportunity of a lifetime in many ways. I was looking for an exceptional opportunity, and I feel like I’ve found that at Smartsheet. Here are three reasons why: 1. Working on The Killer App of the DayI started my career at Microsoft, and worked my way up to General Manager before leaving to build my own company, which was eventually acquired by Quantum. Most recently, I’ve been working at Amazon Web Services for the past four years, leading teams that build and operate some of the most foundational services that power all of AWS.
by Imran Khawaja We all begin our projects with clear goals and intent. You may begin by sitting down, creating your task list, and clearly outlining due dates. But before you know it a task has slipped and the due date has passed. I will admit, this has happened to me more than I would like.
I work as a lead software development engineer at Smartsheet, and when planning a recent release event I was our assigned release captain. As release captain, I am responsible for making sure all work items that are required for a successful product launch are complete. That includes following up with our software developers for bugs that need to be fixed and making sure all changes to the infrastructure are completed prior to launch. by Stephen Danos Construction professionals need ways to eliminate process friction and unify everyone, from owner to architects to subcontractors, throughout the entire construction project life cycle. After all, delays often mean a construction project will go over budget, which is typically unacceptable.
Also, according to a recent McKinsey analysis of construction technology, cost-cutting technologies have gained significant momentum over the last five years. The Smartsheet platform helps construction teams save money and time, and stay connected, empowering them to improve collaboration, plan better, and maintain control over repeatable processes, audit trails, and document versioning. Below are many ways Smartsheet empowers construction professionals throughout the seven phases of construction project management by increasing visibility, centralizing key information, and rapid data collection through mobile-accessible forms. by Staff Writer If you want your business to succeed, speed isn’t just important — it’s everything.
“Speed is fundamental,” says Heidi Pozzo, an executive coach for C-suite business leaders and author of Leading the High-Performing Company. “Speed is the difference in satisfying customer needs, it impacts the cost structure of the business, and it allows the company to be high-performing, not underperforming. It really is fundamental to how a business operates.” When businesses are slow to execute, the costs range from missed opportunities to grow market share to poor employee morale, Pozzo says. A culture of fast, smart execution is a sign of strong corporate health. How can your team pick up the pace? Here are eight questions to ask yourself to help speed up business execution within your organization. Ovum, an international analyst firm, has just released the latest in its series of “On the Radar” research reports that track vendors that are driving innovation in their markets. The report finds that Smartsheet “bears watching as a strong leader in the collaborative work execution category.” Among Ovum’s findings:
According to the report: “The Smartsheet work execution platform provides a solution to the way enterprises need to work today by creating a persistent, shared conversational workspace where users can communicate and share content in one place. It brings content from other apps into one centralized workstream and creates a portal where users receive persistent messaging, alerts, notifications, activity streams, and content-sharing functionalities.” Source: By OVUM at Smartsheet Blog ![]()
by Katy Beloof on January 24, 2018 According to Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged — or are actively disengaged — at work. The economic consequence of this translates to approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity.
Gallup defines this overwhelming majority of disengaged employees as those who consistently give you their time, but not their best efforts. These are employees who show up on time, put in their eight or nine hours, and head home, without contributing their best work or ideas. Finding and retaining top talent has been a concern for companies for quite some time. But keeping that talent engaged at work proves equally challenging — and failing to do so is costly. There may be an answer to this lost productivity in using automation to free up employee time to focus on more meaningful, business-critical work. by Andy Lientz on May 17, 2018 Not long ago, enterprise IT departments would purchase a new application, deploy it to thousands of employees and hope for the best that they would use it. If the app didn’t align precisely with workflows, or if valuable features were hard to find, there was a good chance usage would be low.
We’ve come a long way since then. Interfaces for business software have greatly improved and some applications allow a degree of customization to match the task at hand. But there’s a lot more that can be done to ensure enterprises get maximum value and productivity from their enterprise applications. Machine learning will make a lot of that possible. |
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