Findings sat in the backlog with no status change for two weeks, these are the ones losing money silently.
At a glance
Open rows in your Smartsheet Findings sheet whose Modified (Auto) system column has not changed for 14+ days. The row exists, the PMO can see it, nobody is touching it, and the underlying issue keeps bleeding revenue.
| What it counts | Rows in the mapped Findings sheet where Status is in the open set AND Smartsheet’s Modified (Auto) system column is older than 14 days. |
| What “no movement” means | Smartsheet updates Modified (Auto) on any cell change in any column on the row. So a row with Status unchanged but Notes cell edited yesterday is NOT abandoned, the PMO is at least documenting progress. The metric specifically detects rows nobody has opened or edited at all. |
| PMO advantage | Smartsheet exposes Modified By (Auto) alongside Modified (Auto), so when triaging the abandoned list the PMO admin can immediately see who last touched each row (or that nobody has). Useful for assigning ownership conversations. |
| Sheet scope | Same single Findings sheet as Open Findings. |
| Status filter | Same open set (Open, In Progress, Blocked, Investigating). Closed rows never count. |
| The 14-day cliff | Day 13: not abandoned. Day 14, 00:00 UTC: counted. Threshold fixed at the manifest level. |
| Why 14 days | Two-sprint cadence. PMO-led teams rarely use formal sprints, but most run a fortnightly status meeting, two missed cycles is the working definition of “forgotten”. |
| Time window | RT (real-time, threshold applied at query time). |
| Alert trigger | >5 (warn) opens an amber banner; >15 (critical) triggers a red banner and a Slack ping if Slack is connected. |
| Sentiment key | {'type': 'threshold', 'thresholds': {'warn': 5, 'critical': 15}} |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Smartsheet (API) data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
Same US wholesale-and-DTC home-goods brand from the Open Findings card. 25 open rows in the Findings sheet, snapshot taken on 18 Apr 26.Modified (Auto) distribution on the 25 open rows:
| Last-modified age | Open rows | Counts as abandoned? | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0, 7 days ago | 9 | no | Active. |
| 8, 13 days ago | 5 | no | Inside the 14-day window. |
| 14, 30 days ago | 6 | yes | Last touched in late March. |
| 31, 60 days ago | 3 | yes | Old. |
| 61+ days ago | 2 | yes | One has been sitting since 14 Feb 26. |
Modified (Auto) ascending, see the 11 oldest. For each:
- Pick it up now. Update
StatustoIn Progress, set or changeAssigned To. Editing any cell resets theModified (Auto)clock to today. - Defer with rationale. Add a
Defer Untilcolumn value, leaveStatus = Open. The PMO admin re-opens the row on the deferred date. - Decline. Move to
Won't Fixwith a one-line reason inResolution Notes. Closes the row from this card’s perspective and creates a permanent record in the sheet.
Modified By (Auto), the abandonment review also surfaces who last touched each stuck row. If the same name keeps appearing on the abandoned-then-revived rows, the PMO has a single-point-of-failure conversation to have, not a process problem.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Abandoned is the high-value subset of Open. Always read alongside:| Card | Why it matters next to Abandoned | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| VortexIQ Findings Open | The denominator. Abandoned ÷ Open = “stale ratio”. | Stale ratio above 30% means the queue is dead weight; PMO triage is the answer, not capacity. |
| Finding Resolution Rate (90d) | Active turnover. | Low Resolution + high Abandoned = team is paralysed. High Resolution + high Abandoned = team picks easy wins, leaves hard ones to rot. |
| Avg Time-to-Fix | Speed for ones that do close. | Fine Time-to-Fix + rising Abandoned = team is fast on what it picks but bad at picking everything. Priority misalignment. |
| Tickets by Assignee | Whether abandonment concentrates on one person. | If one assignee owns most abandoned rows, single-point-of-failure conversation. |
| Backlog by Priority | What priority the abandoned rows are. | If 8 of 11 abandoned are Low, close them with Won't Fix, the high-priority abandoned are the ones that matter. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to reproduce this in Smartsheet itself: The fastest method is a saved Filter on the Findings sheet:Open the Vortex IQ Findings sheet → Filter → Create New Filter. Name it Abandoned. Conditions:
Statusis not one ofDone, Won't Fix, Duplicate, CancelledModified (Auto)is on or before today − 14 days
Save and apply. The bottom-of-sheet count is your abandoned total.PMO admins typically pin this filter as a recurring view used in the fortnightly Stale Row Review meeting. Add
Modified By (Auto) and Assigned To to the visible columns to see at a glance who let each row go stale.
Why our number may legitimately differ from your filter:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time-zone boundary | Edge cases | We compute “14 days ago” in UTC. Rows aged 13d 22h locally for a Sydney PMO may already be 14d 6h UTC. Drift at most 1 day. |
| Bulk cell edits via automation | Ours lower | If the PMO runs a Smartsheet Workflow that touches every row’s cells nightly (e.g. enrichment from a linked sheet), Modified (Auto) resets and nothing looks abandoned. Avoid bulk-touching rows you’re not actively working. |
| Comments without cell edits | Ours higher | Smartsheet has a “Conversations” feature; comments do NOT bump Modified (Auto). So a row with active comment threads but no cell edits looks abandoned to us. Bump a cell after substantive discussion. |
| Restored from recycle bin | Ours lower | A row restored from Recycle Bin gets a fresh Modified (Auto); it looks young to us even if it had been abandoned for months pre-deletion. Edge case. |
| Cell-link auto-updates | Ours lower | If the row has cells linked to another sheet (Smartsheet’s cross-sheet linking) and the source updates, the linked cell counts as “modified”, bumping Modified (Auto). The row hasn’t actually been worked, but our metric can’t tell. Workaround: don’t put cross-sheet links on the Findings sheet’s main rows. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
My Smartsheet filter shows 6 stale rows but Vortex IQ says 8. Which is right? The 2-row gap is the standard set of reasons in the reconcile section: time zone (we apply the 14-day cutoff in UTC; Smartsheet’s UI uses your account-profile timezone for “modified before” filters), webhook + reconciliation lag (we refresh on the row event plus a 5-minute reconciliation pass), and sub-row handling (Smartsheet’s hierarchy: we count sub-rows separately if they carry their ownStatus value).
What counts as movement on a Smartsheet row?
Any of: Status change, Assigned To change, Priority change, Due Date change, comment posted on the row’s discussion, attachment added, value edited in any column. Smartsheet’s Modified system column captures all of these. What does NOT count: viewing the row, sheet-level operations (column reorder, filter changes), or summary-cell updates that don’t touch row data.
The 14-day window feels right for a PMO cadence but I want to tune it. Can I?
Yes. Settings → Connectors → Smartsheet → Abandonment threshold (days). PMOs running a strict bi-weekly cadence sometimes prefer 10 days; PMOs working in a quarterly resource-planning cadence sometimes prefer 21 days.
Custom dropdown values like On Hold or Awaiting Sign-off, do they count as abandoned?
Yes by default, because anything not in the closed set counts as open, and the 14-day clock applies to all open rows. If your PMO genuinely uses On Hold as “we have stopped this work intentionally”, consider mapping it to the closed set in connector settings (this records the row as resolved on the audit-programme side, separately from whatever the PMO’s own status semantics are).
We have multiple workspaces with multiple findings sheets. The count looks alarming.
Each connected workspace has its own findings sheet; pin a per-workspace stack panel to see them broken out. Multi-workspace PMOs typically find the staleness clusters on one or two workstreams that just had a leadership transition or a quarterly close.
A Smartsheet row was migrated to a new sheet (PMO quarterly close). Does that affect this card?
Yes, breakingly. If the PMO archives the findings sheet and creates a new one without re-mapping the connector, we keep pointing at the archived sheet (returning a frozen historical count) until you re-map. The single-most-common cause of “the card is suddenly stable while the PMO insists they’re working hard” is exactly this scenario.
Resolution rate dropped, abandoned rising. What changed?
Standard playbook: (1) Tickets by Assignee for sudden concentration changes; PMO findings often cluster on one resource-planning analyst whose other commitments spiked. (2) Throughput Trend for whether overall PMO velocity dropped. (3) Cross-check against any organisational events (quarterly close, leadership change, M&A activity), PMOs are unusually sensitive to org-level events compared to engineering-led PM tools.
The abandoned count appears suddenly higher overnight. Why?
The 14-day clock keeps ticking even when no one is editing. If 5 rows were last touched on the same day exactly 14 days ago, all 5 become abandoned at the same time the next day. Self-corrects within 24 hours of the team picking the queue back up.
Should I close abandoned rows or fix them?
Both, depending on PMO triage. The Smartsheet-specific framing is to use the Won’t Fix dropdown value (already in the closed set) for items that genuinely will not be done, Cancelled for items that turned out to be invalid, and reassignment + due-date update for items that need to move forward. Most PMOs find 30-50% of stale rows should be closed via Won’t Fix or Cancelled; the remainder being correctly re-prioritised is the real win.
Is this the right card for my context, or should I focus on Findings Open?
On a PMO Smartsheet, this card is the discipline indicator and arguably more important than Findings Open. PMOs are designed to absorb queue depth (the spreadsheet model scales gracefully); what they are bad at is detecting which rows have gone dormant. This card does that work the spreadsheet itself does not.
Why doesn’t Smartsheet ship a built-in “abandoned” view?
Smartsheet ships powerful filtering and reporting, but “abandoned” is the kind of operational discipline overlay that does not naturally fit a column-driven sheet. The PMO convention is to build a saved filter; this card is the equivalent rolled up across workspaces and tracked over time.