About Smartsheet Control Center Multi-Tier

New to Smartsheet Control Center? Start here. 

Multi-Tier is a Smartsheet Control Center feature that 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.

Multi-tier provides significant benefits:
Child blueprint projects are created in the parent workspace. The hierarchy helps segment access and logically separate assets 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 is 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 assets in designated workspaces and connects related assets. Once you configure multi-tier, Control Center will automatically create your assets in the correct workspaces.
• You can not change parent attribution after you create a project. You can not 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 assets needed by the Workspace users. 

• 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.