How Cooper Surgical utilized Smartsheet PPM to improve project delivery

About Cooper Surgical:

Cooper Surgical is committed to providing solutions that improve the lives of women, infants, and families and offer value to the lives of every customer. Their products include surgical instruments and systems, obstetrical devices, IVF workstations, genomics, and other goods and services.

Business Background:

• Cooper Surgical R&D group is growing and executing a substantial portfolio of projects.
• There was a need to manage all portfolios in a more effective and consistent manner
• Cooper Surgical R&D has aligned it's work in four portfolios
  
  1. Innovation
  2. Product Development
  3. Software Engineering
  4. Product Engineering

Business Challenge:

• R&D projects were managed separately
• Project reporting to senior leadership was not consistent
• Project templates were not standardized
• Resource utilization and capacity across all R&D were not available during project selection and project scoping
• Deadlines were missed in some cases due to a lack of resources and changes in priorities
• Resource utilization versus project priorities was not transparent
• There was no central location to view all project data and dashboards across four portfolios
• The R&D team needed to establish a disciplined process for effectively managing and deploying R&D resources with respect to business priorities and to provide progress status transparency without creating a high-maintenance environment

Solution:

At Achievan, we first seek to understand our clients’ business challenges and then develop the solution architecture that solves that business challenge.

In the case of Cooper Surgical, they were looking to improve their demand planning, project planning and tracking, and portfolio management.

To solve for that, we started with a 3 tier architecture which would start with collecting all the project ideas as intake.This would allow for capturing all ideas and managing incoming demand.

These ideas from Intake are then vetted and approved and they become projects and then they are rolled up into a portfolio level

Now let's review the Project and Portfolio Level architecture in detail

• We have provided Cooper Surgical an avenue to capture all project ideas using the New Project Request form catered specifically for all their needs.
• The intake process includes a review and approval workflow. This enabled the R&D team to review, access and score the incoming ideas. The intake sheet also enables collaboration between with the R&D team and the requestor using comments, attachments and updated requests. Once a request was approved control ctr. Was used to created the project folder.
• By leveraging Smartsheet’s Control Center, we ensured consistency, and scalability as each new project gets provisioned with a pre-specified template. These include the Project Schedule, RAID log, and the Project Dashboard that is uniform across the entire portfolio and therefore enables greater reporting functionalities. This solved the business challenge of not having consistent templates and reporting mechanism.
• We connected the project schedule to Smartsheet’s Resource Management. Smartsheet resource management’s capacity to allocation feature was key for cooper surgical to solve the business challenge of assessing projects by reviewing resource availability. All these elements in the Project Folder automatically rolled up project data into portfolio view

• We have provided Cooper Surgical an avenue to capture all project ideas using the New Project Request form catered specifically for all their needs.
• The intake process includes a review and approval workflow. This enabled the R&D team to review, access and score the incoming ideas. The intake sheet also enables collaboration between with the R&D team and the requestor using comments, attachments and updated requests. Once a request was approved control ctr. Was used to created the project folder.
• By leveraging Smartsheet’s Control Center, we ensured consistency, and scalability as each new project gets provisioned with a pre-specified template. These include the Project Schedule, RAID log, and the Project Dashboard that is uniform across the entire portfolio and therefore enables greater reporting functionalities. This solved the business challenge of not having consistent templates and reporting mechanism.
• We connected the project schedule to Smartsheet’s Resource Management. Smartsheet resource management’s capacity to allocation feature was key for cooper surgical to solve the business challenge of assessing projects by reviewing resource availability. All these elements in the Project Folder automatically rolled up project data into portfolio view

The Portfolio level brings all the information from the different projects into a consolidated view, leveraging the consistent framework that we achieved through Smartsheet’s Control Center.

• Key metrics across all projects are consolidated into a single view for high level visibility.
• This view enables oversight across all projects through a Portfolio Dashboard which is also hosted on Cooper Surgical’s Intranet website and provides visibility across the enterprise.
• KPIs like Project Health, Ownership, and Progress help Cooper’s leadership team to make timely decisions

Result:

• The image above is a heat map from Smartsheet’s Resource Management
• It is a quick way to visualize the availability of resources across projects and assign resources to new projects accordingly.
• Cooper Surgical team uses this heat map to review Resource allocation over a time period.
• The Percentages show the resource allocation during that specified time period.
• Any resources over allocated are highlighted in red.

• This image above shows a quick snapshot of all the project ideas that are being requested at Cooper Surgical
• There are KPIs that are being tracked and it provides an overview of the volume of project requests.

From Intake to Project to Portfolio, Cooper Surgical is utilizing Smartsheet Control Center to scale Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and leveraging Resource Management to successfully allocate the right resources on the right projects.

Cooper Surgical has seen the following early benefits from this implementation

• Synergy of tools (RM, Control Center) and automation for effectively managing projects in four portfolios
• Disciplined process for effectively managing and deploying R&D resources
• Well received across the entire organization with lots of appreciation