The Client – a Controllership Department within an eCommerce company – had several live projects when I joined and was adding new projects quickly. This led to confusion for the Controller in terms of which team members were responsible for what projects, project phases, current statuses, dependencies and next steps.

The Controller expressed a desire for a project management tool that would provide an easy to access and comprehend visual of the Department’s projects. I gathered the business requirements expressed by the Controller and other stakeholders, and I presented the options:

• Asana,
• Jira,
• monday.com,
• Smartsheet,
• Workzone and
• Wrike.

Because team members from other departments were already using Asana, Jira, Wrike and monday.com, I organized demos by these team members to the Controllership Department to highlight what they liked about the software solutions and to answer questions. I also reached out to Smartsheet and Workzone to have them present to the Controllership Department directly.

Ultimately, the Department went with Smartsheet, and they had 10 hours of live training before they started utilizing Smartsheet for their project tracking. When I left, the next step was to build the dashboard for easy visualization of all of the projects.

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About Ellen

Ellen Vayner has 25 years of experience in management consulting and project management. She has worked with multiple multinational and cross-functional teams to achieve a variety of results, including several financial systems implementations, such as D365 F&O, D365 BC, NetSuite and Concur; the establishment of an invoice-to-cash process; an international manufacturing facility move; and streamlining operations and organizational structures for clients in various industries. She has worked with clients in entertainment, manufacturing, oil and gas, biotechnology, banking, consumer products, semiconductor and real estate, and her specialties include corporate strategy assessment and development, corporate and operational finance, business efficiency assessment, business case development, systems implementations and project management. She holds an MBA in Finance and International Business from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, attended London School of Economics as well as took courses at universities in Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. She also holds a Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute.