The City of Chandler, Arizona Enables Visibility, Transparency and Optimizes Project Resources in Smartsheet

Located in the Phoenix metropolitan area, The City of Chandler is one of Arizona’s largest cities. Over the years, Chandler has evolved from its agricultural beginnings into a vibrant suburban hub, balancing tradition with innovation. 

As Chandler grew, it saw the need to create a more structured approach to managing its diverse portfolio of projects, including enterprise software replacements, large construction projects, and smaller internal software and hardware upgrades. For many years, Chandler relied on a mix of manual processes and disparate spreadsheets and project management tools, and project tracking was often time-consuming, lacking efficiency. Departments operated in silos, making it difficult to coordinate efforts and measure outcomes across the city’s initiatives. “Everyone had a slightly different approach to how they documented projects and submitted them for approvals,” says Greg Hayes, IT Portfolio Manager for the City of Chandler. “There was also a real lack of transparency, and a feeling of not every department having a seat at the table.”

A more efficient solution was also critical because the city tries to align its projects with its strategic framework, which focuses on community safety, economic vitality, and good governance. “By having better visibility into our projects, we wanted to align strategically and ensure we had the resources to deliver on our commitments and prioritize our body of work,” Hayes says.

Streamlining Project and Portfolio Management 

After establishing a portfolio lifecycle and framework, Chandler began searching for a solution that could meet its evolving needs. Smartsheet, the Intelligent Work Management Platform, emerged as the top choice due to its flexibility, scalability, and ability to foster cross-departmental collaboration. 
The initial deployment of Smartsheet focused on IT project and portfolio management. Smartsheet gives the IT team a single intake process, with all projects coming in through the same form, creating consistency in data collection. As projects come into the solution, the city can view all of them at the same time, giving visibility into each project’s status to a governance committee comprised of city directors and department leads. “That means everyone has a seat at the table,” says Hayes. On any given day, the city manages more than 150 projects in Smartsheet.

Smartsheet automated workflows provide real-time notifications for project launches, approvals, and reminders, while Smartsheet portfolio and department dashboards provide at a glance updates and reports for each project. The city also relies on Resource Management by Smartsheet to balance workloads, track time, and forecast project staffing needs, and it uses Smartsheet Control Center for consistent, template-based project and portfolio management.

The success of the IT implementation sparked interest across the city, leading to additional rollouts in areas including workflow management for diversity and equality initiatives, project management for capital improvements, and grants management.

Enabling Transparency Across City Departments

With Smartsheet, departments throughout the City of Chandler have access to real-time dashboards that make it easy to monitor project status and outcomes, leading to better decision-making and project transparency. “With Smartsheet dashboards, we have real-time reporting available for different portfolio project views and we can make changes on the fly to budgets and other factors that might impact how projects are viewed,” says Hayes.

Smartsheet gives the city a more consistent approach to project management because all data is in the same format, visible to anyone. “From the city manager down to the project manager, Smartsheet has helped us do true portfolio management and project management in a way where everything is connected, and we know that we're getting the same data no matter what view we’re looking at,” says Hayes.

Getting Project Data in Seconds Instead of Days 

Because of better visibility and automated workflows that replace manual project tracking processes, the city can more quickly find updated data on the status of each project. “In the past, when I had to get information or look something up, it could take me a couple of hours or a couple of days, depending on the request,” Hayes says. “I'd have to make a few phone calls, walk around and try to find somebody, or visit one of the department heads to find something. Now I can just look in Smartsheet, and within a couple of seconds I can find the information that I need. We're always looking at ways to serve our community better, and Smartsheet has enabled us to do that in some pretty significant ways.”

Optimizing Project Resources 

The city now has a more efficient and effective way to manage and optimize project resources, using Resource Management in Smartsheet to ensure each project has the right people at the right time. “Resourcing is always an issue in state and local government, and Smartsheet allows to make sure each project us staffed properly,” says Hayes. “We manage 150 projects, but Smartsheet makes it easier for us to see everyone’s availability, through features like heat maps in Resource Management. We can quickly see who’s under or over utilized at the department or division level, which is critical to the success of a project. This next fiscal year, we'll do that citywide for all of the departments that have project loads.”

Next, Chandler plans to further leverage Smartsheet’s capabilities. The city is exploring new use cases, such as ticketing systems and expanded grants management, and it is interested in using Smartsheet AI features to create formulas that automate tasks. “Another area we’re excited to explore is intelligent work management,” says Hayes. “That will be important for us in terms of optimizing project workloads and resource requirements, and I think it will give us new views into that along with the ability to leverage AI to do some things we're not capable of doing right now. We’re looking forward to seeing what Smartsheet can do.”

For more information about this story, please see our case study.