Context
Sherwood Forest Faire is an annual medieval festival held on permanent grounds in Texas, open to the public across a run of spring weekends. The site is built rather than staged: stages, pubs, merchant shops, wedding venues, and a castle stand year round, and the grounds also host summer camps and private events outside the festival season. Visitors come for live performances, jousting, and falconry, and the experience depends on the physical site being finished and in good repair when the gates open.
That makes the off-season the operating season for the site team. Between one run and the next, carpenters and electricians take on new builds alongside routine maintenance, with several jobs open at the same time and some work handed to outside trades. The festival was investing in the grounds every year and wanted a clearer picture of where that work stood, and it wanted the off-season planned more formally than a paper calendar allowed.
Challenge
Sherwood Forest Faire runs an annual medieval festival on permanent grounds with its own stages, pubs, shops, and castle. Each off-season the site team takes on a full slate of construction and maintenance projects, many running at once, before the gates open in spring. Schedules lived on a paper calendar and material estimates were done by hand, so the owner wanted a reusable digital tool that showed every timeline, tracked spending and labor against budget, and came with training the site director could follow. The tool also had to fit how the work already ran: crews moving between concurrent jobs, big builds finished first and smaller ones slotted into the gaps, and a season that ends when the gates open. The owner asked for something that could be reset and reused each year rather than rebuilt.
How the team worked
The team started with two conversations with the owner and one with the site director to hear the problem in their own words. The festival was investing across the grounds, crews of varying size worked on several projects at once, and the person running them planned with a paper calendar and strong instincts for material costs. The owner did not want a consultant's report; the goal was a tool the site director would actually use, with training that fit how he learns. Three requirements came out of those meetings and were confirmed by email: track multiple timelines, track spending against budget, and track labor.
With the requirements set, the team compared a plain spreadsheet, Microsoft Project, and Smartsheet, and settled on Smartsheet as the most feasible option with Gantt charts built in. They built on a free trial first so the site director could see a working version before the festival committed to anything, and they used those early reviews to cut unneeded columns, organize rows, and add conditional formatting where status needed to stand out.
The build group set up tracking files for projects, labor expenses, and budget, seeded them with the festival's investment list and the site director's calendar, added drop-down menus for managers, crews, and project status, and grouped projects by location. Project tracking was given four views: table, Gantt, cards, and calendar, so the same set of jobs could be read as a schedule, a board, or a month at a glance. Report files and a dashboard then pulled from those tracking files so nothing on the summary pages needed manual editing.
The training group turned the finished workspace into a binder that explained each page, what to enter where, and how to add or remove rows, with the dashboard and reports described as read-only views of the work already logged. The team met with the owner and site director through the term to check the tool against real projects, and the engagement closed with a final presentation that walked through the goals, the relationships between files, and the next steps for moving onto a paid membership and putting the tool into daily use.
Workstreams
- Gathered requirements with the owner and site director, confirming the tool had to track multiple project timelines, project spending against budget, and project labor, and show gaps between projects where smaller jobs could fit.
- Compared spreadsheet, Microsoft Project, and Smartsheet options and chose Smartsheet for its built-in Gantt charts and ease of adoption.
- Built a linked Smartsheet workspace with three tracking files for projects, labor expenses, and budget, where projects were grouped by location and status and viewable as a table, Gantt chart, cards, or calendar.
- Populated the project tracker from the client's own investment list and the site director's calendar so the handoff started with real projects rather than sample data.
- Connected the tracking files to report files for cost summary, remaining budget, and project tracking, and to a dashboard that updates automatically as hours and costs are entered.
- Split the team into build and training groups, wrote a training binder with step-by-step instructions for each file, and walked the owner and site director through the tool at a final handoff presentation.
What the team found
- The owner and the site director described the same three needs independently: seeing several project timelines at once, tracking spending against budget, and tracking labor.
- Because crews move between concurrent jobs, a view of one project at a time would have hidden the thing that mattered most, which was how the projects overlapped.
- The gaps between the large builds were where the smaller maintenance jobs belonged, so a calendar of the whole off-season was worth more than a tracker for each project.
- Comparing the software options showed the deciding factors were ease of adoption and built-in scheduling views rather than the number of features on offer.
- Training was more likely to land as step-by-step walkthroughs of the actual workspace than as general project management coursework taken separately.
- Material estimates were already dependable, so the tool's job was to capture the timelines and labor that had never been written down, not to replace judgment.
What the client received
- Linked Smartsheet workspace: project tracking, labor expense tracking, and budget tracking files
- Project tracking file with table, Gantt, card, and calendar views, grouped by location and status
- Labor expense tracking for projected and actual hours and costs, compared side by side
- Budget tracking that pulls from the labor and project files for a running total
- Report files for cost summary, remaining budget, and project tracking
- Dashboard showing progress, projected and actual costs, and remaining budget with a Gantt view
- Smartsheets training binder with step-by-step instructions for each file
- Final deliverable presentation and handoff walkthrough
Outcome
Sherwood Forest Faire came away with a single workspace where project timelines, material spending, and labor hours feed one dashboard of progress, costs, and remaining budget. The site director had a training binder written for a first-time user, with each page explained in the order he would use it. The owner could see where the off-season stood without asking for a status update, and had a tool that could be reset and reused for each new off-season rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Recommendations
- Treat the three tracking files as the only place information is entered, and read the dashboard and report files as views of that work rather than pages to edit.
- Keep projects grouped by location and marked by status so the Gantt view shows which parts of the grounds are under work at the same time.
- Enter projected hours and costs when a project opens and actual figures when it closes, so planned and actual sit next to each other for the next round of estimates.
- Use the calendar and Gantt views to find the open windows between large builds and schedule smaller maintenance jobs into them.
- Move from the trial onto a paid business membership so the workspace, the reports, and the dashboard stay available through the build season.
- Reset and reuse the same workspace structure each off-season rather than rebuilding it, adding the year's projects to the existing tracking files.
Next steps
- The client was handed a populated workspace seeded with the festival's own investment list and site calendar, so daily use could begin on real projects rather than sample data.
- The client was handed a training binder, emailed after the final meeting, that walks through the dashboard, the three tracking files, and the report files in the order they are used.
- The client was handed a walkthrough of how the files feed one another, so a change in labor or project spending can be traced to the budget and the dashboard.
- The client was handed a short next-steps sequence: move onto a paid membership, put the tool into daily use, and keep entering hours and costs as projects run.