CKP recognised the right tool to empower their team to work better and achieve.  Together with 57Network's experience in solution building and impactful training, CKP is able to drive their business further even in the midst of Covid-19 lockdown.

Read their full story here.

Are you looking for the right solution for your team so they can achieve more and work better?  Connect with us to understand more.  57Network is a Smartsheet Partner and Smartsheet Authorised Trainer, with our experience in solution building and training, we are all set to live our mission: to empower your team achievement!
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How Marketo Helps Customers Win at Scale With Smartsheet
Marketo University adopted Smartsheet to minimize time spent on operational tasks, improving response time in assisting both external and internal customers.
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Improving customer experience is now a top priority of 80 percent of businesses. Marketo Engage, part of Adobe Experience Cloud, is focused on helping businesses do just that by offering industry-leading email marketing, lead management, and other digital strategies. The goal? To help marketers create real, measurable engagements with their customers through channels, including email, social, mobile, websites, and search.
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“A big focus for Adobe, is empowering B2B marketers to drive business impact, and we want to empower them to create engaging, personalized experiences at scale at every interaction with their customers,” said Jeff Foster, Education Specialist, Marketo Engage.

Adobe is reimagining customer experience management; educating their growing user base on how to get the most from their technology is essential to accomplishing that. That’s why Foster and his colleague Taryn Petzel, Education Coordinator for Marketo University — the company’s customer training and certification program — are on the frontline with customers.
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Marketo University’s mission is to train prospective customers, clients, and employees on how to use Marketo Engage through product education and certification. “At Marketo, digital transformation means constant innovation and helping our customers drive business impact at scale,” said Foster. “To really be successful, marketers need to be able to blend technical skills together with industry best practices. And that's what Marketo University strives to deliver.”

“It’s my job to make sure that our customers are getting the right training and world-class customer service every time they engage with Marketo University,” Petzel stated. Smartsheet is enabling the Marketo University team to scale their processes to match the company’s growth, especially since joining Adobe.

Petzel joined Marketo during the summer of 2017 and inherited tools that made customer enrollment and training workflows, such as scheduling, attendance tracking, and processing payments a challenge to manage.

The original platform required Petzel to look in multiple systems every week to update enrollment numbers. The adoption of Smartsheet has helped their team access real-time data that takes less time to compile, which helps streamline their workflows. With Smartsheet, Petzel and the team have transformed the way they do business.

“I was able to make one of my processes that typically requires multiple emails with stakeholders down to just a single email by simply implementing Smartsheet forms and automated approval requests,” said Petzel.

Removing these communication and process barriers has empowered Petzel to accelerate work execution, so she can better connect with real-time training data and customers seeking product education. “I’m able to make each customer feel like our only customer because I can find all the data that I need to serve them the best,” added Petzel.

As an education specialist, Foster says Smartsheet helps him “cut through the noise and saves anything from falling through the cracks on an individual level.” In addition, the team is now able to develop operational systems that allow them to interact with customers as people, instead of accounts.
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Smartsheet reports empower the Marketo University team to cut the time it takes to compile a detailed, granular executive report from two weeks to 48 hours.

With the combination of reports and dashboards, Foster takes data and surfaces the metrics that leadership wants to track. More importantly, the dashboard is updated all the time and there are no files to share, which gives executives consistent visibility into key metrics and real-time data.

“Smartsheet allows me to minimize my time doing my operational tasks so that I can spend more time figuring out the best way to help our customers,” said Foster. “If we didn’t use Smartsheet, we would have to hire another person on our team specifically to do the tasks Smartsheet performs.”

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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Based in Indianapolis, the Roche Diagnostics Implementation Program office serves the needs of a diverse and expansive customer base in North America. The team realized that in order to best serve their customers, which range from personal physicians to large national laboratories, research institutions and academic centers, they needed to address rapid changes in technology, customer expectations, and economic pressures. Their customers deserve transparency with regard to everything related to diagnostic testing — and they want results and consolidated real-time information delivered more rapidly.  ​
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“The lab directors and lab managers are consumers, too, and they want to have that same [consumer] experience when they’re at work. There’s just not much of a difference between business-to-business and business-to-consumer anymore,” says Michael Ghrist, IT Account Manager for Commercial Operations at Roche Diagnostics. For example, Roche’s customers expect immediate confirmation and real-time updates of order status, and full transparency into their order.”

At the same time, economic pressures are compounding. Hospital laboratories are being asked to run more tests and produce results more quickly with less spend and fewer staff. To support these changes, Roche is developing instruments that produce highly accurate results faster, generating informed decisions for medical action. These instruments also automate the work previously done by qualified technicians who are increasingly hard to find in today’s market, such as performing less complicated laboratory tests on tissue, blood, or other bodily fluid specimens. It’s a new approach for many of their customers.
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“When we’re doing an implementation, we have to keep our customers producing results through the entire process,” says Stacey Bogardus, Implementation Program Director at Roche. “A patient is at both ends of that solution. They’re getting their blood drawn, it’s going to the lab, and there’s a result that drives a treatment option. It’s not like we can just shut down the lab until we’re done with our project.”   

With over 600 projects at one phase or another at any given time — and with those projects increasing in complexity —  the implementation team at Roche needed to standardize their process to help them scale.

“The equipment was getting much more complex and therefore the implementations were getting much more complex. Being able to communicate with the customers, being able to coordinate resources, was a real challenge,” says Ghrist.

The team was also challenged by the disparate sources of information that teams had to work with to complete implementations. For example, says Ghrist, “A project manager would have multiple partners and platforms, each of which contained partial information, and when we won a deal, they would have to manually go capture that information to create the project plan, to get the resources assigned.”
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“Smartsheet allowed us to take that information and automate it, so we get direct feeds now from our internal systems. It’s all consolidated, templates are created, drafts are created, and a project plan,” says Ghrist. “Where it used to take a week, two weeks sometimes, to get all of that information together. Now it happens in an automated fashion within a matter of hours.”

“Whether you’re a project manager, managing a very large complex project, or you’re a service manager, managing a small, relatively simple project, everyone has a similar tool [that] looks the same, operates the same,” says Joel Cox, Implementation Program Director. “And internally, we can extract [implementation project] data, and we can report that, consistently, across all projects.”

“Through our dashboard, for example, we are able to now see one status of all projects and a heat map of what needs the most attention and why,” adds Langford. This standardization and increased visibility enables the team to accomplish even more for their customers.
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Not only is the team saving time with Smartsheet, they’re also improving the implementation experience for other teams across the organization, as well as their customers. “It’s given us a single source of truth, whether it’s the customer, the implementation director, our service and support team, or our sales team. Regardless of who’s looking at the project plan, we’re all seeing the same information,” says Bogardus.

“Our processes and our tools are enabling us to be more thoughtful in how we phase that implementation, how we plan for it, and how we make sure that we are keeping the work moving through the lab while at the same time implementing the new solution,” says Bogardus. “And ultimately, that’s what it’s all about, because the patient is always at the other end of everything we’re doing.”
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Source: Smartsheet Blog
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Professional services powerhouse FGMK had a problem: Dated processes and legacy tools were distracting the team from the work they do best— first-class client service.

With over 1,000 audit and financial statement reporting engagements in a year, and tens of thousands of information requests, FGMK was looking for a better way to handle communications and manage administrative requests related to these often manual processes done in a spreadsheet, word document, or an email thread. After running into accountability issues and versioning headaches, the team at FGMK knew there had to be a better way.

“We found that teams were spending a lot of time on the administrative part of an audit versus doing the actual client service, doing the actual value-added component that is why they're in the field,” says Michael Fernandez, Director of Quality Control at FGMK.

They needed a solution to help free up their employees from this manual, administrative burden by helping to streamline document intake and decrease the back and forth of email conversations. "We just needed to improve our data flow. We needed to improve our collaboration. We needed to improve our communication; internally and externally," says Fernandez.
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By eliminating repetitive questions and clarifying communication processes, FGMK has created a single source of truth in Smartsheet. They now have a transparent system of record that allows for real-time visibility of their audit processes across team members and clients alike, and can collaborate in real-time.

“There is very little miscommunication now, and I think our clients really appreciate it because they feel like information is up front, nobody is moving the goal post, so to speak. They know that what they see is what they get, and it allows them to really have a clear picture of what they need to do; so we can do what we need to do,” says Fernandez.

“I think that the level of collaboration and the transparency with our clients has been the biggest benefit that we've had, and the feedback that we’ve received thus far has been a testament to that. The reactions from our clients have been overwhelmingly positive. Not only are they appreciating the change in our processes, but they are recognizing that FGMK is continuously looking for ways to improve, looking for ways to innovate.”
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FGMK has dramatically decreased the time spent on its yearly audit planning and scheduling process, while maintaining the high level of effectiveness that they expect from their people, through consistent and collaborative tracking in Smartsheet. Using Gantt view, they can clearly see where their employees are running into scheduling conflicts, where there may be overbooking, and where there are potential gaps. This has allowed them to easily reallocate resources and ensure they are on track to meet deadlines.  

“In the past, we had a scheduling meeting that was all of our partners, the scheduling department, and it took over a day. That's everybody with billable time working on an internal, administrative process,” says Fernandez. “This year, using Smartsheet and using Gantt view, we had our teams pre-populate some of this information, we knocked it down to myself and one other partner, and completed it in about three hours. That’s a significant amount of time that is taken out of admin, and redeployed to serving our clients!”

With the flexibility to create custom workflows, gain real-time visibility into client requests lists, and continuously improve on processes through the use of feedback forms, FGMK has started to expand what they use Smartsheet for across their organization including their internal review process, which consisted of over 300 evaluations in just the first six months of use.

“Six to seven months later, we're already looking at how do we expand, how do we do more? Because as we get people more fluent internally, we feel like it's really just the tip of the iceberg. What had originally started as a tool to help our Audit and Accounting Practice gain efficiency has evolved into a valued platform for all of our practice areas, including our Entrepreneurial Services and Tax Practice. We envision a future where all of our professionals, across all service lines, are using Smartsheet to its fullest potential,” says Fernandez.

With the recent addition of Smartsheet Dynamic View, FGMK is discovering a new way to manage access, allowing for secure sharing of selective sheet information with both team members and clients, while ensuring that sensitive data remains secure and protected.

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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“Our work and operational research are to respond to gaps and barriers to the elimination of neglected tropical diseases,” explains Marianna Stephens, Senior Associate Director for Special Programs. The Task Force supports ministries of health in solving challenges in the delivery of preventive medicines to communities. The ultimate aim of this work, conducted with local community partners, is to help countries meet the disease control and elimination goals set out by the World Health Organization.

With a portfolio of almost 200 research projects in 55 countries, says Stephens, “there’s an urgency around conducting the research, and being able to come to conclusions in order to respond to those gaps and barriers.”  
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Despite this sense of urgency, the team often found themselves mired in administrative work, sometimes at the expense of more important things. “The most exciting thing about my work is when I go into the communities,” says Stephens. “I get off the plane and I sense that’s where I need to be. Our team wants to be in the field, in the communities. But there’s a lot of administrative work that goes on related to operational research, and we’ve often found ourselves bogged down by these tasks.”

For example, tracking down the information needed to report out to donors and partners was taking multiple team members days at a time. Project information was primarily tracked in a very long spreadsheet, with supporting documents stored in various other places. “You’d have to scroll, scroll, scroll to find the project you were looking for,” says Chelsea Toledo, Associate Director, Communications and Development.

In one case, the team needed to find out where they were using a specific diagnostic tool, in how many studies, and with what diseases. “I went to those documents and couldn’t find the information. Then I reached out to two of my coworkers, so there were three of us trying to find something that seemed simple,” says Stephens. “That took us almost three days to do.”

Stephens’ realization of the time the team was wasting tracking down information led her to run a pilot of Smartsheet. “I knew there was the potential to develop a system that could make us more efficient,” she says. “And it didn’t take that long to convince my boss.” The team decided to embrace Smartsheet across the board, rolling it out to the entire program.

“We were introduced to Smartsheet as a possible tool that would help us manage the complexity of tracking and reporting on a very large number of projects, over a very large number of countries,” says Patrick Lammie, PhD, Senior Scientist at The Task Force. “I’m always a skeptic about any kind of new software, but we’ve had a great experience with the product, and I have to say at this point that we’re really dependent on it.”
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With Smartsheet, the team was able to find a better way to manage their projects and cut down on administrative overhead. “Smartsheet was the opportunity for us to bring everything into one system that was user-friendly, and where it made sense to have it all together, and where we could design something to fit within our complex landscape,” says Snyder.

The team uses Smartsheet to track their research portfolio from start to finish. Team members use forms to capture information, then manage projects from beginning to end: executing contracts, scheduling field work, ordering supplies, and more. This has made finding accurate information much faster. “It’s made it a lot easier to just run a report and say, ‘What got completed during this quarter?’ ‘Which projects yielded publications?’ ‘And what are those publications?’” says Toledo. “And those publications are just attached to the row. No problem. There it is.”

“I don’t have to go to eight different places to access eight different things. I go to one place,” adds Snyder. “I can share a link with my team members and they can see real-time information, and as I’m making changes at my desk, they can see those.”
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And the entire team has access to program information, so if a team member is traveling and doesn’t have access to internet, another team member can find the most up-to-date information. In one case, Stephens was in Kerala, India, starting up a clinical trial. The team on the ground didn’t know if they had the correct final budget information, so Stephens looked in Smartsheet and pulled the details. “That really helped me,” says Stephens, “knowing that the information I was getting was the latest, the most recent, and the final documents.” With Smartsheet, version control is no longer an issue.

Smartsheet has also helped the team improve the accuracy and timeliness of their annual reports for their three main donors: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, and UK Aid.

In the past, creating annual reports for each of their donors could take months to pull together. Now, says Stephens, “we’re able to do a combined annual report, rather than doing three donor reports. We are able to pull all of our data, generate the reports, and visually present the data in dashboards in a couple of weeks. This has created a very transparent environment for our donors.”

The team also uses dashboards to report on their research findings to partners as well as their donors, in order to define next steps. Says Stephens, “We’re able to extract study details from a sheet and put it into visuals — whether it’s a pie chart, a graph, a map — to demonstrate what we are working on in a visual way.”

This data visualization makes it easier for the team to share their findings with people and partners in the communities they serve, while spending less time on administrative tasks. “Smartsheet allows us to use one platform for all of our work, and really focus on the research in the field,” says Stephens.

“Through the use of Smartsheet, we are getting closer towards global disease elimination targets set by the World Health Organization,” adds Snyder. “I’m doing project management on 188 projects that touch the lives of millions of people around the world.”

Adds Lammie, “I got into this work because I’m a believer that where we have an opportunity to get rid of diseases, we have an obligation to do it. To be involved in the science that enables us to make progress towards those goals — it’s very rewarding. Being able to conserve more of my time [with Smartsheet] to actually do the scientific part of my job is a real gift.”

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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Creating IT Futures — a Chicago-based nonprofit and the workforce charity of respected IT trade association CompTIA — prepares people from underrepresented communities for IT careers. Despite the successes of their training programs, inefficient, error-prone processes with their online training and certification exam voucher programs created a significant administrative burden for staff, students, and education partners.

Without a solution, manual tasks and data issues would continue to divert staff time and attention away from what was most important—supporting CITF’s students and alumni.
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Anna Conger, a consultant with the nonprofit, recalls the stress of registering students for the online training program. Without a consistent process, or a platform to manage that process, the team struggled with meeting the demands for their service.

"One of the biggest challenges with the registration process was that all applicants would complete a PDF and submit it," she says, "so all of the data had to be entered manually into the spreadsheet…The whole data integrity issue was huge."

The organization’s exam voucher distribution program — which gives students free access to valuable IT certifications — faced similar issues, with spreadsheets that didn’t talk to each other and endless emailing back and forth to collect data.

When the staffer handling administration of the two programs transitioned into a new role, CEO Charles Eaton saw it as an opportunity to rethink both programs’ administrative processes. He recommended Smartsheet to Conger “because it was simple, yet flexible enough for our purposes.”
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Prior to selecting Smartsheet Eaton had explored other web services, "but none of them have the simple and intuitive interface of Smartsheet, which makes it easy for the uninitiated to be able to track and update information."

Smartsheet web forms streamlined the challenging intake processes for both staff and alumni and helped to mitigate data entry errors. Finally, both internal and external parties had real-time transparency and the organization has one central location from which to collaborate, track, and manage data.

Communication improved as well. By driving reporting directly from Smartsheet, Conger found she could give leadership real-time visibility into onboarding progress — and facilitate the nonprofit’s partners insight into students’ training progress and exam status. The team also found it could more easily keep students and partners in the loop via Smartsheet alerts, which streamlined sending reminders and updates on training and voucher deadlines.

Ultimately, that initial stress Conger felt disappeared. As Eaton describes it, “Managing the voucher and training system was almost one person’s full-time job. After switching everything into Smartsheet, it became only 25% of her job."

Using Smartsheet also smoothed the transition process when it came time to train the new coordinator, Karin Nordmeyer, who ultimately took over the two programs. With improved processes in Smartsheet, Nordmeyer was able to ramp up quickly while also assuming an expanded role within Creating IT Futures. Says Eaton, “What motivates our staff is the life-changing impact we are having on our students. With only 25% of her time spent managing the voucher and online training process, Karin has had more time to work with students in our Minneapolis classroom and contribute directly to their successful career advancement in tech.”
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Streamlined processes and greater program transparency have fundamentally changed the way Creating IT Futures operates.

"The biggest benefit of Smartsheet," Eaton says, "is that information is instantly updated and can be shared with as many people as we need. … With the increase in productivity and efficiency, Smartsheet saved us about $25,000 a year.”

In the end, that translates into more programs and services for thousands of aspiring technologists.
Which is a wonderful thing. Our fast-changing world is going to need them.

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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With hundreds of employees collaborating on multiple work streams, PayPal needed an easy and available solution to help them gain clear visibility into what was coming next.

By implementing Smartsheet, they were able to see processes from beginning to end, providing them with a summary view that enables them to move business forward with complete confidence. Watch their story:
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Editor’s Note: Here at Smartsheet, our customers inspire us every day. Today’s post comes from Oscar Gonzalez, Senior Program Planning Manager at Karyopharm Therapeutics.

In late 2016, after only five months as a lab manager for Karyopharm Therapeutics, I was promoted to the role of program manager in clinical operations. With no prior experience in clinical operations, I was in for quite a ride.

I couldn’t have imagined that after a year I’d be promoted to senior program planning manager and be the team lead of the program planning, analytics, and innovation group — in large part thanks to the effect I had in the implementation of Smartsheet across the organization.

Karyopharm is focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of drugs that more effectively treat cancer, autoimmune disorders, and other major diseases. We have active studies that encompass over 350 different centers (hospitals, small clinics, medical schools, etc.) across more than 20 countries.

My first task in my new role was to figure out how to manage the timelines for ongoing key trials. The program we were using at the time only offered per-person licenses, so visibility into timelines across teams and testing centers was a big challenge.

After some thorough research, I found Smartsheet, which allowed me to share timelines and see shifts in dates instantaneously, as new information came in from multiple sources. It also helped me track information and updates from several internal departments, as well as hundreds of domestic and international trial sites.
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Once I’d landed on Smartsheet as a solution, I faced the challenge of rolling out the platform internally. The difficulty in initiating Smartsheet was compounded by the fact that as a company, we were in the middle of about ten active clinical trials, all in motion.

We function at a very high pace at Karyopharm, and decisions, data, and information are constantly in flux. Given our fast pace, there was much push back against adopting a new platform. I heard a lot of "who has the time?" What I found was that there were three responses to the new platform:
1. People who were excited to work on the new platform
2. Those are were intrigued but not ready to fully invest
3. Those who said "I don't have the time," or were simply reluctant to enter a new system.

​I found that the key was to focus on the individuals in the second bucket, and get them to a place where they could invest more fully. I learned what they needed and recreated their trackers on my time to show them what having all of their information in Smartsheet allowed them to do. I created the spark, gave the embers time to burn, and eventually the system caught on like a wildfire.

When I started my role as program manager, most of our information was managed by sending spreadsheets back and forth over email, which often left us with conflicting or outdated information. And sometimes information was hard to find, given that it’s pretty common for staff members to have thousands of unopened emails at any given moment.

Now, with Smartsheet, we can keep important updates out of staff email inboxes. Having a more direct way to deliver information saves time and effort for everyone. Through the use of notifications we’ve reduced the need for additional emails upwards of 70 percent.

I’m also able to better manage upcoming deadlines when working in Smartsheet. For example, when the last patient at a clinical site has taken the last dose of an investigational drug, the clock starts ticking on our deadlines for reporting trial data to regulatory bodies. Working in Smartsheet makes it easier to confirm that all necessary documentation has been collected and verified before it’s time to submit the drug for commercial approval.

Smartsheet not only allows me to visualize the entire program, but it has given me a purpose and a platform to optimize how our company functions in a way that I never thought was possible.
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Now we use Smartsheet to manage everything from setting up a clinical trial to updating records to feeding information back and forth between our medical affairs group and our medical clinical research administrators.

We have even launched project dashboards to display live on monitors all around the building. Our dashboards allow everyone in the company to see how their work is affecting project timelines, which in turn affects how quickly we can get this medication to patients.

I never thought I could have this kind of impact in a company. Smartsheet gave me a platform that propelled the work of my colleagues, as well as my work, to the eyes of our executives, and to an eventual promotion after just one year.

Oscar Gonzalez tells more of his story as part of the Smartsheet in Healthcare customer panel at the recent ENGAGE’18, in Bellevue, WA on Oct. 1-4, 2018. 

You can also read more about how Karyopharm Therapeutics uses Smartsheet dashboards and sheets to give clinical teams, CRO staff, and project managers constant access to trial information.

Source: Smartsheet Blog

The scientists, lab technicians, and project managers at Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc. have an ambitious goal: to create drugs to more effectively treat cancer, autoimmune disorders, and other major diseases. Making a big difference in the lives of patients means carefully managing the smallest details — everything from efficiently setting up and certifying a clinical trial to updating records when a researcher’s office gets a new phone number.

“We have active studies that encompass over 350 different centers such as hospitals, small clinics, and medical schools across more than 20 countries,” says Oscar Gonzalez, program planning manager at Karyopharm. “A lot of organization has to happen to achieve our goals, and it’s truly a labor of love. The people here have a passion for what they’re doing and for what, ultimately, we’re trying to do for patients.”
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Headquartered in Newton, Mass., Karyopharm is focused on the discovery, development, and commercialization of novel drugs that regulate the movement of proteins within cells to help them destroy cancer cells, without the same toxic side effects that previous compounds targeting these cellular proteins have shown. Gonzalez is responsible for identifying and managing risk for the company’s clinical trials, which help researchers determine whether the drug has the same effectiveness and safety profile when given to patients as it has exhibited in laboratory testing.

Conducting clinical trials requires careful design, formal approval of testing by the appropriate national regulatory agency such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S., training and certification at each clinical site where trials will be conducted, and scrupulous tracking of the trial’s progress — including any unexpected events. Delays at any point in the process can ultimately delay the drug’s review and approval for commercial availability. Gonzalez tracks information and updates from several Karyopharm departments as well as from hundreds of trial sites, including the contract research organizations (CRO) that manage programs in the countries where Karyopharm doesn’t have staff on the ground.

“A lot of these projects can exceed two or three years,” Gonzalez says. “You have to maintain a constant relationship and constant engagement, and that also includes feeding information back and forth from our medical affairs group and our medical clinical research administrators, so we can better adjust our projections or our end goal.”

When Gonzalez joined Karyopharm, much of this information management was done with spreadsheets sent back and forth via email, leaving staff or clinical teams with conflicting or outdated information. Karyopharm considered adopting a widely used project management system, but the vast number of people who needed access to review or input data made licensing for the solution prohibitively expensive. Smartsheet provided a central location for project information with the flexible, secure access required to manage medical data from around the world.
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With Smartsheet, Gonzalez can create sheets with information about each clinical trial, and grant access to CRO staff or clinical teams so they can provide their own real-time updates such as site readiness, patient enrollment, progress toward deadlines, or side effects or health issues that patients may experience during the course of a trial. He has also created dashboards to aggregate data from different sheets, so that he and the project managers for specific trials can instantly see vital status updates such as whether a site has met its enrollment target or is running short of supplies such as lab kits.
“This dashboard has become the icon of what our projects are doing,” Gonzalez says. “It allows everyone within the company to see how their work is affecting the bottom line, which is when can we finish the project — because ultimately, we need to get this medication to patients.”

The dashboards have proved so popular with Karyopharm stakeholders that a project is underway to set up screens that can live-stream them to staff throughout the company’s headquarters — as Gonzalez puts it, comparable to a Bloomberg terminal for Karyopharm’s drug development process. It’s an innovative way to keep everyone informed, which is not just a smart communication strategy but a matter of regulatory adherence as well.

“This is a pharmaceutical company. We’re subject to inspections at any time,” Gonzalez says. “It’s important for everyone to have an idea of what’s happening across the board, not just within their immediate role. That information gets discussed within development leadership meetings every week — where I actually use Smartsheet a lot.”

One of the biggest advantages Gonzalez sees with Smartsheet is that it keeps important updates out of Karyopharm staff email inboxes. In an industry where it’s not uncommon for an individual staff member to have thousands of unopened emails at any given moment, having a more direct way to deliver information saves time and effort for everyone. It also helps ensure that the company can be aware of upcoming deadlines; for example, when the last patient at a clinical site has taken the last dose of an investigational drug, the clock starts ticking on deadlines for reporting trial data to regulatory bodies. And it makes it easier to confirm that all necessary documentation has been collected and verified before it’s time to submit the drug for commercial approval.

Gonzalez has not only created a valuable information resource for Karyopharm, he’s created a name for himself within the company by solving one of the biggest problems they were facing. Having proved the value of Smartsheet to the clinical operations teams, he’s eager to help other teams adopt the solution and streamline their own processes.

“When you understand the system you can do almost anything,” Gonzalez says. “It can pull out metrics or information that you thought was only available by data mining. It not only allows me to visualize the entire program, but it gave me a purpose and a platform to optimize this company’s functionality in a way that I never thought was possible. I would never have thought I could have this type of impact in a company; Smartsheet essentially led the way for me to do that.”

Related: Make Better Decisions Faster With Dashboards

​Source: Smartsheet Blog
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Kendall Pouland, director of professional development, needed a better way to manage the skills training and advancement process for a growing team of ambitious project managers — and found it in Smartsheet.

As a family-owned business that’s been operating in Houston for more than 100 years, Tellepsen focuses on projects that make a difference in people’s lives. Construction project management is one of the largest teams at Tellepsen, and vitally important for the business. Project managers work at construction sites organizing the full range of onsite operations. Pouland had worked her way up through the project management ranks; spending 10 years working at building sites in a hard hat had taught her that a PM’s work is complex, and that clear feedback is essential to mastering the job.
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“I build it with everything marked with an 'incomplete' status, and if you want to move forward in our organization, you own this, and you now have the ability and the information that you need to get all the way through,” Pouland says. “If you need help on any of the skills, it’s our responsibility to provide you with the knowledge — mine or your boss's or another PM's — but you are in charge of your destiny.”

Color-coding helps PMs identify which skills they’ve mastered and which still require work. When a PM marks a skill as completed, the sheet alerts a manager via email, who can approve it or give specific feedback on what still needs to be learned. Managers can access and update their team members’ competency matrix sheets on mobile devices and send feedback from the construction site, any meeting room, or at home rather than waiting for an in-office day.

“Mobile usability was important to us,” Pouland says. “It made it simple for the approvers to do their job. They’re really busy, not sitting at a computer all day and maybe not even that technical, so being able to approve from a phone with a couple of clicks is beneficial.”
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As a PM completes the necessary skills, the cells in the sheet shift from red to yellow to green. The greener the competency matrix, the readier the PM is for promotion. If the sheet isn’t turning green quickly enough, the reasons are easier to identify.

“For the manager, sometimes it’s a feeling — ‘I just don’t feel like he’s ready to be promoted,’ but it’s hard to pinpoint why,” Pouland says. “This was the perfect place for the manager to say, ‘You need to develop this communication skill’ or ‘You need to improve at tracking and following up with tasks.'”

Not only does the competency matrix make individual advancement easier, it makes annual performance reviews more efficient. Because PMs and their managers communicate throughout the year, the review process brings no surprises and can be completed with a brief questionnaire. In the first year after adopting the Smartsheet competency matrix, the project management team completed its performance reviews in a week, while other teams were taking closer to a month.
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“Smartsheet has made conversations easier. It’s a lot more clear to people what they need to work on and has opened up those lines of communication."

Pouland is working to roll out the competency matrix structure to other teams, one job category at a time, so that everyone at the company can get clearer direction for managing their careers.


“Smartsheet has made conversations easier. It’s a lot more clear to people what they need to work on and has opened up those lines of communication,” Pouland says. “We’re full of a bunch of Type A personalities. This solution has made the difficult conversations easier because we’d already had a committee that sat down and wrote down exactly what you need to be good at. It’s definitely helped people to focus on where they need to start moving forward.”  

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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