Untangling Complexity at Boston Scientific
For years, the Boston Scientific’s Bay Area divisions relied on a hodgepodge of siloed tools, which included Microsoft Project, SharePoint and other homegrown solutions, to manage projects—with a mixed level of success. For an organization that operates across 100 countries, having a more cohesive and enterprise-capable solution quickly became a top priority.
The urgency stemmed from a lack of project management structure, which led to disconnected projects, poor visibility and reporting and inefficient resource management. Predictably, this problem is not unique to Boston Scientific. In a recent study of project management professionals, IAG analysts found it to be an industry-wide epidemic. They discovered that up to 68% of all projects will ultimately fail to deliver the expected outcome.
In Boston Scientific’s case, their requirements were threefold: Gain 360-degree visibility and insight into cross-organizational project lists; enable more efficient and effective use of resources; and finally, accommodate both strategic on-going projects as well as surprise projects that require immediate action.
Tale of Two Divisions
Boston Scientific’s San Francisco Bay Area operations includes its San Jose-based Cardiac Rhythm Management division, responsible for the development and manufacture of electrophysiology devices, and its Fremont-based medical imaging division, which produces devices that provide a view inside the heart and coronary arteries.
Both BSC Bay Area operations include research and development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, information technology, human resources, capital equipment service and distribution. The two divisions rely on hundreds of ongoing and inter-related projects in order to meet product launch deadlines, provide new services, achieve quality goals and improve manufacturing operations. Keeping these two groups aligned, communicating and working efficiently was extremely difficult with disparate tools and limited visibility across projects.
Boston Scientific established a Bay Area project management office (PMO) in 2012 to help achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness. “Our project execution capability was limited by an absence of consistency and repeatability,” notes Anita Neuman, manager of BSC’s Bay Area project management office. “We lacked standardized tools and a standard reporting mechanism for project management.”
To overcome these challenges, the Bay Area PMO used the Clarizen free trial to conduct a successful month-long pilot. The PMO test team conducted a mock project using sample project portfolios. “We had some concerns because we had not used a cloud-based application before,” Neuman says. “We discovered that the cloud provided a lot of advantages in terms of overcoming our internal barriers. For instance, we did not have to buy or install software on several hundred devices.” The team also realized the importance of standardized collaboration and a project management solution that would eliminate their siloed, and disconnected legacy tools.
The successful proof of concept led the PMO team to move directly to full implementation, which was completed in two phases. Phase one of the rollout focused on providing visibility across strategic project portfolios with an emphasis on governance, phase gates (e.g., investigate, candidate, active, complete) and a standardized template to support a variety of project types. Phase two focused on increased user adoption, pushing the standardized portfolio management approach deeper into the organization and enabling greater integration with legacy tools and processes.
Solving for Efficiency and Success
BSC project management teams now have true visibility across multiple project portfolios and ensure that every project is directly tied to key business results. Many reports, including executive dashboards, that were previously produced manually are now built into the Clarizen implementation and are available via Clarizen widgets embedded in SharePoint, Excel and other tools.
In one case, the PMO team could track operations time spent on new product development and cross-charge that time to appropriate divisions such as R&D. The automation of manual time-tracking processes is saving one full FTE, amounting to a savings of more than $90,000 per year.
Widgets installed in the PMO SharePoint portal also allow users to view portfolio content without logging in. An Excel add-in, embedded in the portal, provides dashboards that give executives up-to-the-minute project status on every portfolio item within Bay Area operations.
The cross-portfolio connections have helped eliminate surprises across different management teams by enabling them to avoid project delays due to lack of resource availability or other conflicts.
The BSC PMO team recently implemented the meeting minutes app from the Clarizen Apps Marketplace. The free application turns meeting minutes into action items that then appear in project, user group and discussion group threads, enabling these items to be tracked like any other project task.
“Clarizen enables projects that originate in one portfolio to be linked to all portfolios where it will have an impact.” Neuman explains. “This type of visibility ensures that we are working on the right things and that our resources are deployed where they can make the greatest difference.”
Executive Summary
Challenge: Assortment of tools to manage projects led to disconnected project lists, lack of visibility across projects portfolios and inefficient resource management and deployment.
Results
- $90K savings per year with automated time-tracking and cross-charge reporting
- Increased resource optimization across all project portfolios
- Reduced risk with standardized templates and automation
Discover how Clarizen can make a difference for your team—start a free trial today at: http://mkt.clarizen.com/kmw