In this guest post, Brian Pugh, VP of Engineering for Lucid Software shares how the company used Smartsheet to successfully manage and execute a complex, critical project: Early this year, Lucid Software's engineering team confronted a monumental project, and I knew I needed an easy, collaborative tool by my side to ensure our success. Lucidchart is a cloud-based diagramming application that serves hundreds of thousands of users – from freelancers to enterprise corporations – so we couldn’t afford any surprises.
The project was an effort to rewrite all of our back-end services in order to improve the scalability 
and reliability of our application. During the early stages, we spread out small portions of the project over several months. At a certain point, however, the nature of the beast required us to tackle a huge chunk at one time.
Because we had to release a large number of significant changes all at once, it was the riskiest thing we've done at Lucidchart in several years.
As we got close to the release date, I needed a better way to track all of the things that had to fall in line. That included everything from high level tasks -- functional testing by this date, code reviews by this date -- to minutiae like the 20 steps we had to complete on the day of the release.
My first mistake was starting off in a Google Document. Google Docs are great for lots of things, but they don’t offer a way to represent dependencies, which was critical. By dependencies, I mean a situation where you can’t accomplish a task until another task has been completed. For example, we couldn’t do the functional testing until the testing environment had been set up.
In the Google Doc, I was inputting a bunch of dates and then manually toggling between my calendar and my doc. I’d update the dates in the doc, change the task’s owner, and so on and so forth.
Obviously, that was time-consuming and frustrating.
I remembered hearing that Smartsheet had a Gantt chart template, so I just took the doc and pasted into Smartsheet.
Powerful Feature Set
Immediately, I had something that was far more useful. I tweaked it a bit and soon it was exactly what I wanted in a Gantt chart. The experience was comparable to that of Microsoft Project, but minus the expensive price tag and limitations around collaboration.
Smartsheet has some truly surprising functionality that simplified my work. For example, my chart featured a list of tasks that could be broken down to any number of subtasks. They’re automatically “rolled up”, so I know when the main task will be finished based on the due dates of the smaller tasks.
I can easily assign a person to each task, as well as assign a percentage done, which rolls up into the main task as well. So I can see the percentage done of each project, of each task, of each subtask, of each sub subtask, and each one is always up-to-date.
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Simple Collaboration
Smartsheet’s collaboration is also great. I can share the document with the other team leads and they can then go in and make their own updates. I get daily notifications via email telling me if a team lead updated something.
Plus, the actual Gantt chart was included right in my email with the changes highlighted. That made management super simple, and it saved me several clicks, several times a day.
Anyone in my line of work knows that the clicks add up quickly!
It was also easy to set up dependencies--you just drag from the end of one task to the beginning of another, and Smartsheet recognizes that you’re trying to symbolize a dependency. With dependencies in place, it was easy for my team to track how close we were to getting everything done.
Wrapping It Up
Before we began the server rewrite, one colleague remarked that this endeavor was like trying to carry a baby to term in a single month. But despite the complexity and enormity of the project, we completed everything in record time, with surprisingly few hiccups. This was due in large part to Smartsheet.
Smartsheet saved us time, increased the speed and quality of team communication, and reduced the overall risk of our undertaking.
The efficiency, affordability, and flexibility of Smartsheet--coupled with the wonderfully intuitive interface--ensures that Lucid Software will be relying on this solution for future project management needs.
Brian Pugh is the VP of Engineering for Lucid Software, makers of the cloud-based diagramming solution Lucidchart.