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Customize your Project Plan
   
by tailoring Smartsheet

6.3. Example Scenario / Case Study

Because this subject about licenses, permissions and roles, is of theoretical art and sounds often more
confusing than helping, I would like to give you rather a practical example.

Let's assume we are a company, called Top Equip Automotive Ltd. We have 800 employees at our sites,
and we develop and manufacture parts for the automotive industry.

A few months ago, a major project failed terribly, the most important customer complained, and the
CEO got mad. They brought in some consultants to interrogate the situation. They found out that at
R&D was already a "Process" defined how to handle projects. It was a plain Work-Breakdown-Structure
(WBS), but mainly for the reason just to show at audits. In truth, the project teams just went ahead on
gut-feeling because they said they have already enough experience to know how to proceed. The con-
sultants were not happy with this kind of "Culture", how to handle project management. Concerning
"IT-Tools", it turned out that all project managers had the outdated Microsoft Project 2010 installed
on the hard drives of their computers, but it was not in high regard because they had never been
trained about. Concerning on-going projects, it turned out that there were thirty-seven current pro-
jects, handled by seven project managers. On a whiteboard was the staff in an org-chart visualized.
Here is the picture.

Customer: CEO / Senior Manage-
Project Manager ment

Sales Product Designer
Customer: Project Manager
Purchasing Prototype Shop
Cost Estimator

Customer:
Quality Logistics AQP Advanced Quality Planning
Controlling Manufacturing
Customer: SQE Supplier Quality
Logistics
Process Engineer Engineer
Purchasing
Material Disposition

Supplier(s)

There was then a discussion about the requirements for a modern software. The demands were, to
have an easy-to-handle project management tracking software tool available. There were pros and
cons about Microsoft Project versus Smartsheet. Senior Management as well the consultants opted in
the end for Smartsheet, because it was kind of spreadsheet looking and formulas could be easily built
up. Not the many features counted, but rather if it seemed to handle it without difficulties.

Now it was time to talk about plans and licenses. As plan was picked "Business". The pricing for a
license was $19 per month. First, there was some confusion at Senior Management. They were con-
cerned about their projects, stored in Microsoft Project 2010. Main question was: "Can we transfer

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