I may not have my terminology correct, but if we are mainly tracking 3-4 projects and their progress, we could have a base with each schedule as a separate table, correct?
Yeap pretty much. How much leeway does each of those PMs have to dictate how their teams work? If there isn't much leeway at all, then you may as well get them to all use one base
---
I'm thinking I would create the table fields that all PMs have to adhere to in order to maintain consistency. From there, we could make the various views, such as calendars, reports, etc., from the data in the tables.
Yeap! Then as long as they had those fields you'd be able to sync to your reporting base
===
It feels like the main question is how much agency your teams have I think. If the plan is to tell them 'Here's Airtable, use it for your projects' and expect them to create their own tables, fields, formulas, automations etc (and trust them to do so!), then having separate bases would be the way to go so people don't get in each other's way
Managing a base used by multiple stakeholders becomes a bit of a nightmare because you're never really sure how a change you're making in one place might affect someone else's workflow. For example, you might have a "Status" select field where there's an option called "In progress", and you update it to be "Ongoing" instead. A few hours later you find out someone's formula field broke because they were looking for the text "In progress", and that field triggers an automation. (This was not a fun experience heh)
Airtable kind of recognizes this as a problem and has a feature that helps with this called the App Library (https://support.airtable.com/docs/using-app-library-and-components-in-airtable), and the idea is you create the skeleton of a base that your teams deploy on their own, and you can set what bits can or can't be modified by those users. This is Enterprise only though
If you mostly expect them to use their own systems and then update Airtable for reporting purposes, then you can stick to one base, and if you don't trust them to create their own systems properly, then you should also stick to one base!
Happy to get on a quick (free) call to hammer out any questions you might have, and you can grab a time that works for you
here!
