About Smartsheet Control Center multi-tier

Multi-tier allows one blueprint to treat another blueprint as a parent. Multi-tier is helpful when you need to create projects under identified business contexts like regions, line of business, sub-projects, or portfolios.

Who can use this?

Plans:

  • Smartsheet Advance Package

Permissions:

You must be a Primary Lead in Control Center to configure multi-tier.

Find out if this capability is included in Smartsheet Regions or Smartsheet Gov.

Multi-tier provides significant benefits:

  • Child blueprint projects are created in the parent workspace. The hierarchy helps segment access and logically separate items in Smartsheet.
  • Your blueprint summary can route rows to corresponding parent sheets instead of to a single summary sheet. Distributing rows across parent sheets improves performance on Control Center deployments with over 500 projects. 
  • A multi-tier project is structured in a way that makes it easier for you to create reports and dashboards that reflect the structure of your business. 

A basic multi-tier implementation has one parent attribution and requires two blueprints. You might have a project blueprint and a portfolio blueprint. When you create a project under a multi-tier scheme, it's automatically attributed to the parent portfolio blueprint. 

Tips for Control Center multi-tier 

  • Consider what you want your hierarchy to represent. For example, a hierarchy with regions as the parent blueprint with projects as the child blueprint allows you to see projects by region easily. 
  • It's best to set up your project with no more than three levels.
    • Portfolio Blueprint
      • Program Blueprint
        • Project Blueprint: A project can have only one parent. 
  • Control Center creates project sheets and other items in designated workspaces and connects related items. Once you configure multi-tier, Control Center automatically creates your items in the correct workspaces.
  • You can't change parent attribution after you create a project. You can't migrate existing single-tier projects to multi-tier.

Multi-tier checklist

If your deployment meets one or more of these scenarios, multi-tier is the best way to deploy your Control Center projects. 

  • You want to limit access to your projects by segment.
  • The parent blueprint routes new projects to designated workspaces, creating only the items the workspace users need. 
  • You have a lot of projects: The parent blueprint distributes blueprint summary rows across parent sheets, allowing you to work around inbound cell link limits. 
  • You want to keep your blueprint summary separate from your projects. For example, you might want to generate different reporting data at the parent and child levels. Since multi-tier uses multiple blueprint summary sheets, writing formulas or using those sheets for other things is simpler.