In this tutorial, we'll examine two different online digital tools that can help you to develop and monitor SMART goals. Collaboration is especially important when developing and monitoring SMART goals within a team. So using online tools that allow for group collaboration can be especially helpful. We'll look first at Google Sheets, and then its smartsheet.com. Let's get started.
Google Sheets is a great way to develop a SMART plan that can be shared with the entire team. All team members can collaborate on the document simultaneously. One way to use Google Sheets to develop or monitor your progress towards your SMART goal, is to create a column listing action steps or responsibilities, columns for start and end dates, and a column that lists who are on the team will be responsible for each action.
You can share the Google Sheet with others by clicking the Share button at the top right corner of the window. Enter the email addresses of the people with whom you wish to share the sheet. And be sure to give collaborators permission to edit the document, otherwise, they'll only be able to view it but not make changes, and this will limit their ability to collaborate. A neat feature of Google Sheets is that you can use Google Calendar in conjunction with your spreadsheet. Team members can receive reminders in Google Calendar of upcoming dates, including reminders of actions that they're responsible for or of targets that they are responsible for measuring.
Another online collaborative tool that you might consider is smartsheet.com. Smartsheet provides a project template that you can customize to create your SMART goal template. The project template includes a Gantt project view and a dashboard all wrapped into one intuitive document. You can create a free account linked to your Google account.
See how the same elements from the Google Sheet have been incorporated here into the Smartsheet. The action steps are listed, and responsibilities have been assigned to team members on the Smartsheet. An additional feature here is the Gantt chart view, which shows you a visual timeline of the actions or events in your plan, start and end dates for each action are displayed, along with any benchmarks you've included along the way.
The dashboard in Smartsheet will allow you to color code the actions in your plan. I've used green to indicate completed steps, yellow to mark steps that are in progress, and red for steps that haven't yet been started. This color coding, especially within the Gantt view, allows an easy at a glance view of your team's progress towards meeting your goals. You can see how using this online Smartsheet tool can really increase both collaboration and accountability among the members of your team. Then, it can also make it much easier to monitor your progress towards your SMART goals.
I've shown you two different online collaborative tools that you might consider for monitoring your team's progress towards your SMART goals. Here's a chance for you to stop and reflect which of these two tools might be the best fit for the needs of your team. To dive a little deeper and learn how to apply this information, be sure to check out the additional resources section associated with this video.
This is where you'll find links targeted toward helping you discover more ways to apply this course material. Thanks for joining me today. Have a great day.
(00:00 - 00:25) Introduction
(00:26 - 01:29) Google Sheets
(01:30 - 03:00) www.smartsheet.com
(03:01 - 03:05) Summary
(03:06 - 03:37) Stop and Reflect
SmartSheet
SmartSheet is an online project management tool that allows for collaboration and monitoring of SMART goals in an easy to use format. There is a video tutorial on the homepage to walk you through the process.
https://www.smartsheet.com/
Get started with Google Sheets
Google Sheets is an online collaborative spreadsheet that makes it easy to collaborate and monitor the implementation of any site based initiative. Google offers a useful guide to get started using Sheets. Be certain to check out the templates that are freely available that your team may select instead of developing its own template.
https://support.google.com/docs/topic/20322