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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by Guest Author
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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.

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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by Renee Hunter on March 6, 2018
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One of the best ways to spot a productivity killer? Identify a process or communication tactic shoehorned into a tool that wasn’t originally built to address that very problem. One common workplace productivity killer hiding in plain sight is our meeting culture, and the slide decks these meetings are often beholden to. As we’ve morphed slide decks from presentation aids to status documents, increasing numbers of hours are wasted consolidating slide decks and cramming status updates into a static document.

Luckily, work management tools can help address this problem. Case in point: the Services Operations group at Cisco has proven that work management solutions can be a powerfully effective replacement — with game changing results.
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