Quadrupled # of IT Projects Completed Within One Year

An early-stage biotech client was struggling to understand, organize, and deliver critical IT initiatives. As a result, IT was reactive to the needs of its stakeholders, who were extremely dissatisfied.

Understanding the value of project management processes and project governance, our client asked us to help assess and organize the work and devise simple yet impactful changes to ensure the work got done.

What We Did

1. Assessed The Work

We scheduled interviews with IT leaders to understand what they were working on, including responding to and resolving tickets, modifying existing systems, and implementing new systems, and we captured all salient details. During the course of these interviews, we started to obtain a sense that IT was working on a mix of steady-state and temporary initiatives.

2. Organized The Work

Then, we sought to organize the work—to do so, we introduced the idea of a project (an initiative with a defined start and end date intended to achieve a specific set of goals) and we placed those projects onto a Gantt chart. We then shared that Gantt with each IT lead to help them track the most critical and visible items their teams were working on.

3. Rolled Out Basic Project Management Framework

To ensure the work got done, we devised and rolled out a basic project management framework, including a stage gate, to evaluate and prioritize new initiatives. In doing so, we set basic expectations of what constitutes a project, how projects should be managed, and how project updates should be communicated. In addition, we created and introduced several basic tools and templates that project managers used to capture project scope and objectives, kick off projects, and dashboards.