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.
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:
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: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:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
The Abandoned concept exists on every PM connector with the same threshold (14 days) and definition (no row-level edit / status change). If you switch destinations from Smartsheet to Jira (or vice versa), this card resets, the historical Smartsheet abandonment doesn’t migrate.
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.