Best Practices: Smartsheets

Note: This is a proposed process, and is still under review.

What do we use Smartsheets for?

We use Smartsheets for high-level tracking of project progress. What's that mean? It means you can find the following types of information in a project's Smartsheet:

• A very high-level list of the work we plan to do and the due dates, including:
  • Strategy work
  • Wireframes
  • Mockups
  • High-level features
• Important notes for client relations, such as how to translate client requests when they use the wrong or potentially confusing terminology in a very predictable and consistent way

How is Smartsheets different from Github?

You might say that designers and developers "live" in Github. You know all the details about your project, you're in Github every day, and if you had to, you could probably tell someone pretty good directions offhand on how to get from place to place and what's where in your project. It's a lot like your neighborhood. You might not know everything about it, but you're a local and you know a whole lot.

But what if someone new moves in, or you're new to the project? Maybe there's someone who only visits the project once in a while. They still need to be able to figure out how to get from place to place, and about how long it will take. In real life, we use a map to do this. Think of Smartsheets like a map of your project.

How detailed do maps get? Just detailed enough so you can tell where you need to go and how long it will take. Smartsheets is not for detailed documentation.

There is still an important role for your "local" knowledge as a designer and developer - imagine if all you had to go on were maps and directions when visiting a new place. You'd want to know much more in order to plan the details of your trip! This is the role of Github in a project. Github is like a local guidebook - put that critical contextual information and the missing details of what someone needs to have a great visit to your project there.

Best Practices

• Keep it simple. Only list major work, features, and milestones in Smartsheets.
• Use Smartsheets to track the percentage completed of a major piece of work or feature. Leave the specifics of individual task and work status - inboxed, prioritized, in progress, ready for release, and released - to Github Projects to manage.
• Smartsheets is the source of truth for deadlines. Do not manually put due dates in Github Issues. If you choose to use Github Milestones on your project, deadlines should be updated during sprint planning.
• Always link to the matching Github Issue for each line item in Smartsheets.
• Use the language present in Github for naming your line items in Smartsheets.
• Bugs get unwieldly quickly in Smartsheets. Track individual bugs in Github, and link to a Bugs milestone in Smartsheets for one bugs line item to be able to see the real-time percentage of all bugs completed. Do not track individual bugs in Smartsheets.