Customer Spotlight: Improving Accountability at Scribe Software

John Gravely is Vice President of Marketing and Product Marketing for Scribe Software, a provider of data migration and integration software for a wide range of applications, including popular CRM and ERP programs.  We asked John to share his experience using Smartsheet.

Situation
Scribe is headquartered in Bedford, NH with an office in Europe, a geographically dispersed sales force, and a network of channel partners.  We were looking to improve collaboration among team members and streamline the process of providing status updates to the executive team and board members.  We tried Basecamp and still use it a little bit for tracking competitive info but it didn't work for us as a project management tool.  It really came down to one word, "flexibility".  No two of our sheets are alike.  We needed to add a Cost column to one of our projects but couldn't do that in Basecamp.  We wanted a column for Original Due Date and one for Current Due date - that's how we like to track drift.  We also use indenting for sub-tasks to set up and view projects in our own way and Basecamp didn't have that flexibility.

Why Smartsheet?
I really think Smartsheet is onto something with the approach of starting with a spreadsheet that everyone knows how to use and then layering in the more robust project management features.  We've had no problems with people learning and adopting Smartsheet, which is key because collaboration solutions don't work if people won't use them.  It is flexible and makes it easy for us to track projects the way we want to - with no IT or developers required to add or change a column.  We also love being able to attach files and track discussions at the row level.  If someone can't make a meeting, I just send them an update request so they can update the project from email, which I think is killer.  There are simple things that add up too, like the Red/Yellow/Green visual symbols.

How do you use Smartsheet?
Because Smartsheet is so configurable, we keep finding new ways to use it.  Currently, we're using Smartsheet for the following:

• Product launch - tracking all the marketing stuff we’ll be doing for the launch
• Trade show event management
• New product development tracking - this is really Go to Market management; not just development milestones but also product marketing, marketing, sales, support and training to do’s
• Task tracking for individual contributors -for example, our marketing manager keeps one Smartsheet to manage a team member that gets a lot of small tasks assigned to him
• Project issue logs
• Task force status updates - alerts are key for people who get assigned tasks.  If we didn't have one place to put all the stuff that comes out of meetings, it wouldn't work.

Benefits
While it's hard to get hard ROI numbers around improved collaboration, I'd summarize the benefits we see from using Smartsheet as:

• Consolidated location for information - people know where to go for latest update
• Happy board members - our board members love being able to login from anywhere to check in
• Simplification of accountability - we can see status and who's on the hook for something.  It's changing our mentality because if someone says "we should do this", then it's going into Smartsheet with a name on it and a date.  It's helping us establish a culture of execution.

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