Advanced Planning Group is a financial consulting organization for High Net Worth Families and Individuals.

Briefly describe your team:

Advanced Planning Group coordinates the work between some of the leading financial professionals in the world on a project-by-project basis. Each project, or “case” is unique but there are often similarities to each other. Each case has a unique timeline, distinct deliverables and different players.

How are you using Smartsheet.com?

We use Smartsheet to track the progress of our high net worth client cases. Each case has a unique timeline, distinct deliverables and different players.

When did you start with us?

May 2007

What issue/s were you looking to solve?

In our industry, MS Excel is the default for project management. But MS Excel has failed to keep up with the collaborative space.

What stood out for you?

Smartsheet took the best of MS Excel’s straightforwardness and familiarity and brought it into a collaborative environment. Smartsheet allows groups to work in a familiar spreadsheet environment while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility of spreadsheet functionality.
Also, the SplitScreen view is even more powerful in a collaborative environment because you can have changes taking place at multiple levels with multiple participants.

What were you using before?

We would often circulate MS Excel spreadsheets by email.

How did Smartsheet.com address what is unique to your business?

Each case we manage is unique and our timeframes on a per project basis are short, three months to one year, so an overly regimented database approach wouldn’t work. With Smartsheet, we can develop a library of commonly used fields and templates, share them, and quickly build custom project plans for each unique case.

What results have you achieved from using Smartsheet?

Smartsheet has allowed us to grow our firm’s intellectual capital through the development of the shared template and fields libraries.