Smartsheet recently released two new Enterprise features: Portfolios and Scenario Planning.
For teams managing multiple projects in Smartsheet, these updates are designed to reduce manual setup, improve visibility, and make it easier to evaluate changes before they impact live project plans.
Here’s what each feature does and why it matters.
If you've ever kicked off a new project by duplicating an old sheet, clearing out the data, and rebuilding your reports from scratch, Portfolios was built for exactly that frustration.
The feature gives project leads and team managers a structured, repeatable way to spin up and oversee related projects. Instead of manual setup every time, you define a standardized template once. From there, new project workspaces are created automatically when a request comes in, each inheriting the exact structure you defined, including sheets, dashboards, reports, and forms.
Portfolios also includes built-in starting points to help teams get up and running faster. It comes with a standard template that includes a RAID log, a project health dashboard, and a personal "My Work" dashboard for team members to see their assigned tasks at a glance. There's also a guided onboarding walkthrough built in, which is useful for teams setting this up for the first time without a dedicated admin.
A central Project List serves as your command center, providing access to every associated workspace and a portfolio-level dashboard that rolls up high-level data from all your projects. That view is sourced directly from the Project List, so it updates as your portfolio grows.
It's a strong fit for teams running recurring workflows like new product launches, client onboarding, IT ticketing, or departmental project tracking. Smartsheet recommends keeping portfolios to around 5 templates and 100 projects for manageable change control, which gives you a sense of the scale it's designed for. If your team relies heavily on Resource Management or Dynamic View today, it’s worth factoring that into your rollout plan, since those capabilities aren’t currently supported within Portfolios.
Most project managers aren't short on opinions about what should happen when priorities shift. What they're short on is a clean way to show their work before committing to a change.
The typical workaround is familiar: copy a sheet, test changes in a separate file, walk stakeholders through the options, and then manually apply the final decision back into the live plan. By the time you're done, you've created file sprawl, lost time, and probably had at least one meeting where people were looking at different versions of the same plan.
Scenario Planning moves that entire process into Smartsheet natively. You can create up to three distinct scenarios per plan, pulling together data from up to five project sheets into a single view. From there, shift timelines, reassign resources, adjust allocations, and compare your options side by side without touching the live plan. When stakeholders align on a path forward, you apply it in one step and the project sheets update automatically.
The stakeholder piece is where it gets most useful. Instead of going into a leadership meeting with a recommendation and a spreadsheet, you can share scenarios directly so everyone is looking at the same data when the decision gets made. That alone tends to shorten the back-and-forth considerably.
Both features are included in Enterprise plans at no additional cost, with one caveat: Scenario Planning's more advanced capacity-planning capabilities, such as placeholder planning and role and discipline insights, require the Resource Management add-on.
As a Smartsheet Aligned Partner, Winmill PPM helps organizations implement and optimize Smartsheet for their specific project and portfolio management needs. If you're considering how Portfolios or Scenario Planning could fit into your current Smartsheet environment, Winmill PPM can help you identify the right use cases, setup approach, and rollout considerations.
Contact us to get started.