0116. Harnessing the Power of PPM Tools for Organizational Synergy: A review of Smartsheet's PPM whitepaper.

-Effective Project Portfolio Management Strategies

-Challenges and Opportunities in PPM Tools

-Implementing Technology in Organizational Processes

-Effective Deployment of PPM Tools

IDC White Paper: The Power of Next-Gen Project and Portfolio Management

https://www.smartsheet.com/inside-smartsheet/research/IDC-project-portfolio-management-whitepaper


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Transcript

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:02

Welcome back to another episode of Lean by Design Podcast. Today we have a few things we're going to talk about in the world of project and portfolio management. There was a white paper that was recently sponsored by Smartsheet. A disclaimer we are users of Smartsheet. I have been using it for right about eight years. I've seen the evolution of the software of the company that just reached $1 billion in revenue. Congratulations to them. They recently released a white paper that they sponsored with IDC. We'll link that into the show notes.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:44

Really, the question that they were looking to get answers to was, in this ever-changing world, in this industry biopharma industry where projects and advancements are becoming ever more complex, the work continues to increase and these developments continue to increase and at times are viewed as disruptions. They can shift a flexible model that has been necessary after COVID, that these organizations now need to start really have clear and direct messaging on how to manage the work across these hybrid teams, these projects, these teams and time zones. One of the questions that they had were that there are organizations out there that are just they're crushing it. What is contributing to their success, to their thriving organizations, with teams that effectively communicate, that effectively align, that it just seems like everybody is on the same page all the time. What are they doing? This was focused on the project program portfolio management tools. If you take a look at the white paper, you can see the questions that they had there. The white paper had a total of 629 respondents from business IT. It was a global survey in five sectors yes, healthcare, life sciences, it, education and government. What they did was they asked for business priorities over the next 12 months to understand where these organizations were and what they were going to prioritize over the next few years, over the next few months the actions to drive the results, the priorities to drive those strategic results. What does all that mean? How are these organizations running this? That's what we're going to talk about today. Very interesting stuff, lawrence.

Oscar Gonzalez: 3:57

I took a look at this report and it didn't really feel shocking to me, but I think that in some cases it would, because there does seem to be this big move to invest in project tools that allow you to be very flexible across the organization. We've already talked about AI-driven processes that are. It seemed to be the topic of conversation In the conferences past week at Scope in Orlando. Ai was probably every other conversation. We even had conversations with members of the FDA, with representatives from the FDA on AI, which a guidance is going to be coming out on clinical trials and AI in the coming weeks, a draft guidance that FDA has been asking for us to provide feedback from, because we're the ones that are going to be running trials. We, as in organizations, pharma, et cetera they're looking for us to understand more of how people are using AI.

Oscar Gonzalez: 5:12

Just a couple of top hits from the white paper 93% of the respondents believe that the workflow automation is a priority, but less than 79% are reporting less than half of their project portfolio workflows are automated. I know it's in sense. Even so, when they look at organizations of higher maturity, they're finding that they're six times more likely With higher project portfolio management maturity, are six times more likely to see a strong or unlimited scalability. Isn't that what everybody wants?

Lawrence Wong: 6:03

Yeah, I think from the finding that you said about. Obviously, I think it's a consensus that the workflow automation is a priority, but ironically, only half of their workflows are automated. Why is it that they? Why is it the case? I think, about some of the processes that we've worked with from our clients and the reality is that it's messy. It's often hard to automate something if it is not clean and that you don't have a defined process for it that aligns with the strategy and the goals of the company. To me, it sounds like the actions of companies are not matching the priority they have. They're saying one thing but they're doing something else. I think, as I glance through the study, the thing right above it and the key findings was some of the challenges that they think it says here 47% of respondents cited the expense of these tools, 44% cited micromanagration with other systems of records and then 41% cited postmanagement concerns In the realm of project management. How accurate is this assessment as it relates to the work that you do in managing some of these drug development projects?

Oscar Gonzalez: 7:32

You know, I think if I tackle the first one, which is sort of expense, I don't see that so much. I think there are different software that's available that has varying levels of licensing. Now, when you're looking at enterprise solutions, which typically you're going to want your PPM tool to be enterprise-wide. Why? Because everyone's running projects, whether or not it's a R&D or a clinical project. There's probably some project on the finance team to create a little bit more efficiency. The legal team probably has a project where they're trying to initiate a new system. There's some level of management, even executive leadership. They have these leadership committees that they need to be able to log in. Who's talking, what's the conversation, what are the decisions from this? What are the actionable outcomes from the four hours that we just spent with the top leaders of our organization? These things need to be logged in somewhere. They need to be available somewhere so that you can have it as a reference tool. You can use it to sort of power the next steps. So I haven't seen too much of the expense side Now, in terms of how much that expands, I think it's very common for folks to have you know for organizations to maybe focus those tools in their project and portfolio management space initially.

Oscar Gonzalez: 9:09

And then what I find is that over time, as adoption, as usage begins to grow, that sort of accessibility becomes more organic and folks begin to ask for more access. They ask for licensing because they saw that this group did something that was really helpful and had a great way of organizing it and it sent out alerts without having to do that. It decreased the amount of manual emails they had to do. So organically it starts to grow a little bit. I think it is difficult to create an enterprise-wide solution right off the bat and just say, hey, everybody's going to be doing this because you know, as you mentioned before, those are some of the challenges. What was that second one? Can you remind me one more time?

Lawrence Wong: 9:57

The second one was lack of integration. But I want to go back to the point that you made about expense. I think, depending on how you deploy, obviously, there's just a general rule. You're not committing fully to the enterprise tool that I have to do in a pilot Understanding. Okay, does this actual solution work for this project that I'm trying to thrive? And then once you kind of work out the kinks, then you can go okay, let's scale this thing and let's get some more users on it Obviously, nobody's looking at a cool and smart thing or yeah, let's just get 5,000 people to get on the platform and start using it, because they're not going to use it. And when you do that, that's where the expense comes in. I think the other part of it is understanding how expensive is it now for you to run your projects without this BPM tool, right? I don't think people often think about how much that operates in cost versus. Hey, if we use this thing to speed up the project, what does that look like? What is the cost savings from using this tool?

Oscar Gonzalez: 11:05

What is this costing? But what is it costing your organization to not have a solution? What is it costing your team to be in a struggle to locate information, to identify information? And what's really neat about these PPM tools? In many cases they are super customizable. So what I mean by that is you can create a level of customization for your own organization.

Oscar Gonzalez: 11:40

Now, to learn and to understand how these systems work is pretty simple. There's usually some type of tag and you start to find the similarities between activities, between initiatives, and you are sort of connecting all of these things via specific categories, project numbers, people, et cetera, so that you can build these robust reports that give you specific views that you're looking for. The idea here is that these project portfolio management tools they're looking into your operations and you are asking it to give you back something specific. You're not going back in there to look at every line by line item but, as I mentioned to most people, you're collecting that information somewhere, whether you're writing it in a notebook. That really doesn't give you much leverage with that piece of data, because now that piece of data is a handwritten piece of data on a piece of paper and it's not digital, it's not digitized.

Oscar Gonzalez: 13:10

So when you start to use these PPM tools for sort of your day-to-day activities, you start to find that most of what you're doing in the day-to-day is now has a digital footprint. And what can you do with that? Well, you can get numbers, you can get metrics, you can connect it to somebody else. So I think that there's a lot of value there. And again to your point what does this cost look like now if you don't act on bringing that unity into that project, into those operational tasks?

Lawrence Wong: 13:46

Yeah, so that touches on the lack of integration with other systems and records, and I think the last point here is about 41% study of things management concerns. So, again, not all PPM tools are creating a tool, right. So you can have a PPM tool, let's say, like a Microsoft project, where you have a project file, but that file doesn't allow you to collaborate with other people, and so, even if you have something to do, it doesn't mean that you can necessarily share it with very limited visibility, unless it relies on some SharePoint, which then you'd have to download, update and there's all these, I would say, areas of friction that just make you not want to update it constantly and you're having to download things, upload, and it's much less flexible than, let's say, a solution like SmartSuite, where you have some, uh, these essentially nodes that you can create, right, that connect information from all different sorts of speech reports that feed up into a dashboard. So that was kind of my opinion on you know, I think these challenges are well articulated in that, yes, they are some top challenges.

Lawrence Wong: 14:59

I think something that I've seen, just from larger companies, maybe not committing fully to SmartSuite or some other PPM tool, is they're just creating their own tools internally right. So, whether you're using some sort of like coding or maybe you are leveraging some of these Microsoft tools, you're building essentially something for your own organization and then trying to scale it to your team, but again, that's that's like a grassroots thing and it's very long for you to do that and you're essentially designing a product for your company. It used to be a lot harder, maybe a decade ago, but now with all these new AI tools and another, uh, essentially software building tools, you can leverage those to create the solution that you are. But again, it's still not as fluid and dynamic as some of these fast products like the SmartSuite.

Oscar Gonzalez: 15:57

You know, I think one thing that I give a smart team and some of these other project management tools credo to is that when I try to design a solution, I'm not going to look directly with a fine microscope, super fine focus on our industry. I'm a firm believer that there are solutions outside of our industry that influence us. And so when we do create when we got, I think one of the risks when we do go down the the the route of creating our own software, you're sort of limited by what your knowledge is of the space that you work in. And it's very interesting to me when you start to see you know, for example, smartsuite has a lot of templates that are in finance, in HR, and I play in my wedding on SmartSuite and had a dashboard actually to show how many people and the timing and etc. You start to see there are event planning on there. You know all these things that, okay, well, that's event planning. Well, guess what? That offsite meeting that you're having, that's event planning. It doesn't mean that you're planning a wedding, it doesn't mean that you're planning a debutant ball or what have you, but it is still in concept, in principle your offsite, your team offsite, is an event that you're planning, so you can leverage those types of tools, and it sort of gives you a different perspective. Rather than this is science, this is so different than anything else, this is so unique in many ways it is, but in many ways it is also standard work that is happening in other places, just with a different hat. So what I like about these PPM tools is that they sort of give you a different perspective for how to use something, because, you know, I love Biopharma, but, holy cow, we love to make things very complex and it doesn't always need to be that way. So you know, I think that's also part of what that change management you know looks like, and I was actually surprised that the change management wasn't higher.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:09

I was expecting that to be one of the top ones, because you hear about failures of adoption. You hear about well, we created this, we designed this and no one has really adopted it. But as soon as you start asking leading questions, you know how many, how many trainings have you guys done since then? Oh well, we did one when we launched, all right. So you know this.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:35

This is something that you're now trying to create habit within your organization, within your team.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:40

You're now trying to build these foundations, and the only way that you're going to do that is by creating new habits within that team, for this is how we're going to work through these items here.

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:52

You can do everything else the way that you decide that you want to do it, but right now, these are the core things that we need to be able to work with, report from and train in. And when you start to establish that and you create this level of visibility, this consistency in hearing about the dashboard that was built or hearing about the reports that are being automated, it sort of permeates through the teams, through the organization, and that really lends into that change management, because then you start getting a lot of curious people, and that's what you want. You want the curious people to come in and say, hey, this was really cool, that this came to me, like, this is exactly what I needed and I didn't even have to email anybody. How does this work and can you tell me about it? And that's when you start to sort of cultivate this layer of adoption and it's continuing. It's a continuation as things evolve.

Lawrence Wong: 19:56

Yeah, I mean, these tools are essentially creating opportunities for people to do better work, right? I think you had a point about just making sure that the tools that you know, the key form tools, are maintained over time, whether it's training or having specific, I would say, advocates in your organization that are maybe comprehensive essentially right, knowing the internet, of using the tool itself.

Lawrence Wong: 20:25

And it's very similar to, I think of, when you buy a car and you've been, you know, walking somewhere for the entire time and you take the car, you drive it to wherever you're supposed to go and you know, maybe you're driving local traffic, but the car can also go on the highway and you can go a lot faster and go to those places. But if you do not know what the car was capable of, you wouldn't know to use it right. So I think that my point is just making sure that people are aware that this thing was used for. You know one particular project or you know one particular process and they're going to start piquing their curiosity and go okay, well, what other things can I use this for?

Lawrence Wong: 21:04

right, and that goes back to your point about drawing people in and making sure that you know this thing that you've heavily invested in, not just in terms of dollars, but time and people and putting up some of your highly strategic initiatives in this vehicle.

Oscar Gonzalez: 21:25

Absolutely. I mean, you brought up a really good example. You know, if I were to ask you right now, have you pressed every button that exists in your vehicle right now? Do you know what every button does? Absolutely not. You heard that there, ladies and gentlemen, absolutely not, and that's very common. And that's also very common with some of the software that we have.

Oscar Gonzalez: 21:46

You know that we work with every day because you know, what we look for is how quickly can I get my job done? We don't really look at how do I expand the spaces or the technology that I'm using, how do I understand that more to even further optimize the work that I'm doing? You know, even from the perspective of going into we'll even take a simple example of going into Excel I go to Excel, I click here, I filter, I create a pivot table, I get this, I create a chart, etc. You can develop a macros that literally records each of your steps and anytime you decide that you need to execute that series of steps, you can click on the macros and it will actually do that entire thing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 23:12

Now you have to do a little bit of setup in the beginning and there's going to be a little bit of trial in there in the beginning, but I would rather spend that two hours up front so that every time I do this, this process, within something as simple as Excel, that that's going to take me no more than five minutes and previously would take me an hour. So these are some of the things that you have to sort of invest in, not only in yourself, but also understand the technology that you have and really dig deeper and ask a lot more questions of what can I do with it? How can I do this? I am doing these levels of activities. This is the level of information that's in here. How else can I leverage this system to empower the work that I'm doing, to create those efficiencies and really drive down the amount of time that I'm spending recording and taking more time to review and reflect on the work that we're doing?

Lawrence Wong: 24:11

And aside from some of the, I think for us it's very obvious some of the benefits of using the PCN tool. As you went through the paper, was there anything that you were very surprised about in terms of how some of the polling was for the epic intent of like 600 plus respondents for this? And I think for me, the biggest surprise that I saw was, I think, somewhere along the beginning of this white paper it said that most legacy PPM tools don't offer strategic alignment across stakeholders and teams. So I think that we're going to have four user variants in significant adoption of barriers. That leads to sporadic uses, in poor data and requiring a strong organizational mandate and high expenditure for deployment and adoption. So when I read this, I didn't, you know.

Lawrence Wong: 25:08

I think there's some proof to this, but I also don't think that the tools alone offer strategic alignment. I think people leadership do right. You really have to get whoever is, you know, deciding to commit to this tool. They have to be very clear and upfront about why are we using this and what do you. What exactly are you trying to do with this right?

Lawrence Wong: 25:31

Otherwise you go and then people just start complaining about things, and then they don't use it, and you know how it goes.

Oscar Gonzalez: 25:39

And not just that having the foresight of where can this take us, where can this take us and where can you know what is the future here? Because if you look online you know, oh, this is a work management tool that you know, takes care of you, know your task and you can put it here and you can communicate back and forth. Awesome, it's the combination of all of those features that are really showing you okay, this is how you can connect all these pieces. You need to dictate which ones matter most to your organization, which ones matter most. You know there's tons of features within Smartsheet that I've never touched. Why? Well, it's not really for R&D development, it's not really for clinical trials. It's not built for that, it's built to manage work.

Oscar Gonzalez: 26:26

So we sort of leveraged some of those standardized things that we do to sort of focus our efforts while, you know, taking in any additional changes. I mean, it didn't really surprise me when I read that, because there's sort of this to your point if it's not really, if it's not really championed and we're not considering the strategic direction of the organization, where would this even fit for people to actually do any kind of work into it? You know, the idea is that well, we want to scale, or we have this many projects that we have to manage. You know, if you have one project, maybe you don't need a PPM tool. But if you have six or seven projects, nine, 10 functions and teams that are all involved in the project, they're not all looking for the same thing, but they all need to know where the project is at all times, just in a different perspective. So you start to look at what are each of these teams contributing to the project? How do we get that data to also talk to what we're trying to put in together and create this network of information specific to that project, and then that rolls up to your portfolio, rolls up to your leadership and so on. And so I think that those challenges with adopting the PPM tools is not only just in that project management space, but it's also going to be in those adjacent functions that are also a part of the team.

Oscar Gonzalez: 28:21

You know when I read this. So when I took this paper, I took all the data and I started to ask myself, like, what are we actually talking about here from an organizational perspective? What is the key to providing success here? And there's three things, and you hear a lot about it People, your process and your technology. And some people are liking that to sort of your tech stack. Well, technology isn't going to stop. Ai is here. We have to recognize that, but we also need to prepare for what that means for an organization. So, with people, process and technology, I actually sort of created this triangle where it goes from people to tech and then, looking at your process, your people and your tech are going to determine what kind of process you can build out with the technology that you have. Your tech is there not necessarily to augment person, it's more of to expedite the work that you're already doing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 29:27

Okay. And once you have the people and you have to develop that support too, you cannot say this year, everybody needs to have a goal where you're going to have personal development, okay. Well, how are we cultivating that in the organization? Oh, in your free time, get out of town. You want me to land one of the corporate goals that exist, for my bonus in many cases, on my free time. Have you worked here before? There's not really a lot of free time and this is also, you know, a challenge for folks to see the value of spending the time to look for these efficiencies, to look for these tools so that they do have the time for personal development, etc.

Oscar Gonzalez: 30:21

So I look at that, but then I also look at different arrows going in different directions, for example, from the technology to the people. You have this level of technology. You need people to champion it. You need people to root for the success of that technology and have a level of curiosity, because these technologies are built not just to stay within this small bubble of work or effort. Those organizations are going to continue to adapt and to adapt their technology that they're selling to attract more clients. So it is your responsibility that when you get a new piece of technology, when you find the ownership, they should know more about that tool than anyone else in the organization, more than IT, and it is only to their benefit. It gives you visibility as a person, it gives you ownership, it gives you a lot of credibility when you understand a system from top to bottom.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:23

But you really have to dig and understand what are the capabilities of this technology that we're using in all these different spaces? And then how do we connect it in as few steps as possible to give us what we need, and that's you know, it's just, it's this little piece here and making sure that we're developing that culture of transparency and alignment. So you know, I think for me there's some key components there between the people, the technology and what processes you decide to put into there that you can't really just focus into one space. You have to sort of take them all together. You know what does this mean for the process? Is it going to affect another stakeholder? Don't launch the technology that will affect a process that is also attached to somebody else in a different department or function. You need to bring them along as well, because the expectations change, the process changes.

Oscar Gonzalez: 32:22

So I think, with this, being able to have those, you know, and what can leadership do? I mean support process skills, you know, creating those skills, creating those resources for people to you know, to have additional training, bringing somebody in, creating a champion, cultivating that this stuff becomes, it becomes habit. You need to create a habit and you can only do that with practice, with focus. It's an investment in your own improvement, your own personal development, professional development. I mean that's what we're talking about here.

Lawrence Wong: 33:06

Yeah, I think so to your point about this. You know three components that are part of this. I guess the strategy of deploying the TPM school people talking in process, I think you know we talked about right before we were recording just making sure that these business goals are clear. So that really defines, like, why you even need this in the first place, right. And so people are saying, hey, this is, we know where we need to go, and so now we need to understand what blend of the tech and our skills can we leverage for this particular process? Right, and you're right, it's not a static event, right, Because business goals change. People come in and out of your organization, the technology you may learn has more capabilities, and so now all of those things are influencing that what your end process is going to look like. So, again, what makes these tools so powerful is that it's not. They're flexible and they're adapted to how your business is scaling, how it's changing, but it requires sponsorship from the leadership, right, they have to recognize that yes, things are going to change like.

Lawrence Wong: 34:16

This is not Pennstone and you have to really invest in the people being able to spend time. A lot of people are playing with the tool itself, right, Like you said. Right, I don't know all the buttons in my car, but if I have some time, I'll sit in there and go, oh, what's this? And, like you, try to play around with some of these things, obviously driving. But if you're pulled over on the side of the road and you have some time to kill, then you look around and you say, oh wow, I didn't know my car could lock, with me just touching the handle, Like that's something I found with my super that I had no idea about. So, yeah, I think leadership, giving the time and investing and allowing people to play with the tool and develop new capabilities will make the overall process more efficient, but it allows them to think about new innovations that they could make in some of these other adjacent areas that you may have not thought about using before. But now that you know it's capable, now you can deploy it elsewhere.

Oscar Gonzalez: 35:17

Right and regardless if you're going to do off the shelf or create yourself, there is a time of adoption. I mean you're. We talked about it at the very beginning. This is seen as a disruption. It is being seen as a disruption for the way that people work. Why? Because we've been using, you know, the same standard tools that are not connected and we deposit them into folder structures that are online in a server. Well, none of that data is connected. The data that you add in PowerPoint slides, the data that you add in Word documents and Excel and a notepad and a dry race board none of that is connected to any other piece of data. And that is critical data because it captures our thoughts, it captures our motives, it captures our feelings at that time. It captures discussion points and actions and risks and decisions. And until you find a space to sort of combine all of the work that we're doing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:25

And this sort of came out in my early days as a project manager, because I noticed that no one was really looking at anything that I was producing and I thought to myself what really is the role of a project manager Now? I knew everything inside and out because I was constantly the one that was entering the information, but if it doesn't help anybody else, you know, am I really using my time wisely? So it was really in that moment of just like I need to make people. How do I say this? I need to make people invested. I need to get people invested in what I'm doing. And as soon as we started putting action items with names and started flashing those up because you need to build again that visibility and people start seeing their names on there oh, I didn't realize this. Well, there's an automation. You received an email two days before this was due. From this due date, you received another email Like there's no, like we discussed this, and then you just conduct additional training and eventually it becomes that habit. It becomes the way you work within that organization.

Oscar Gonzalez: 37:41

So adoption is a key thing, but you can't especially in the initial stages of launching, you can't just do a one hour lunch and learn and call it a day, because people need a little bit more than that. If you ask me, yeah, if you gave me one hour to be with my vehicle, I'm not going to know nearly as much stuff as I would if I get to go into that vehicle every single day and start to touch things and figure out how things move around. So it's super critical for that to be cultivated within organizations and it comes from leadership, whether it's a chief of operations at some point or the CEO themselves. It's critical to have. All we want is transparency. We want everything to.

Oscar Gonzalez: 38:31

What's the biggest question you get from leadership? We don't know what's happening, we don't know when it's happening, we don't know, we don't know enough. And guess what? Everything that they're saying is captured digitally somewhere, but we're putting it in slides, we're tucking it away, we're putting it in different folders that exist in other places, so we're not connecting all the pieces, we're not connecting all the discussions. And that's where one of the comments from the white paper and I love the way that they frame this integrating PPM tools into the fabric of your work.

Oscar Gonzalez: 39:08

So you're weaving in these tools into the work that you're doing every day, so that you don't have to repeat it, you don't have to rebuild it, you don't have to rewrite it, because it's there. It's there and now, of course, there's a method to the madness, to the structure, but that's what experience gives you. I didn't build things the same way I did when I first started doing smartsheet. Now, eight years in, I'm going to think about eight or nine steps ahead and say, well, if we're going to run and do these activities here and we're not prepared to make that next step, we're going to build this in a way that leaves that door open for that next step and we'll continue to do that because, in principle, when you innovate, it's not just one time.

Oscar Gonzalez: 39:52

When your people change, when your tech changes, when your process is changed, all of that needs to go in unison. When your process change, you need to train your people. When your tech change, you need to change your process and train your people. When your people change, you need to train the tech. You need to show the process. They may become a process owner. So this whole triangle. They go back and forth because they're constantly going to change. The only thing that we can predict is that change is going to happen. So we need to know that change doesn't just happen and then we just let that sit. It's going to affect all the other processes and our technology in that space.

Lawrence Wong: 40:34

Yeah. So the only I would say proof is that change is coming and maybe what happens all the time and there's no way to stop that from happening, because people, technology and the process changes as the business changes. I think you made an earlier point about some of the work that you were doing as a project manager sometimes get lost in the board and maybe not visible or transparent to some people. Leadership I think you've only PPM tools allows you to have very concrete data and evidence to support some of the decisions that end up thriving, some of the progress of the project Right. Yes, if you're not using a PPM tool and you're working on a project where people are constantly complaining about something, just because something is being talked about often doesn't actually mean that that's the problem, and sometimes you need these tools to be able to measure and use data to say well, you said this is a problem but it's actually not because here in this step, this is where nobody is recording information and this is where the gap is Right. So it just reminds me that availability bias that you have, just because something is in the space all the time, doesn't actually mean that that's the issue, but when you have a tool. That is new for that mindset, and it's just clear.

Lawrence Wong: 42:05

This is the data, this is the progress that we've made. Now your leadership isn't asking you hey, what's the status on this? What's the status on that? It's very clear. This is where the holdup is. Or, hey, we're making progress on this timeline, whereas before it was? Oh, I think so, and so is what happened. It's like that's not effective. Like how much time are we wasting here playing a guessing game on how far we've come or how much we still have left to do?

Oscar Gonzalez: 42:30

The conversations change. The conversations change from status updates to strategy alignment, transparency, curiosity. You actually have the time to focus on that. You can burn a whole project team meeting just throwing things to the wall to see what sticks. What do we know? What do we not know? Rather than, hey, what's the status? Things that we can regurgitate from the work that we've done day to day. That's the whole idea here is that you create these reports, you create these dashboards for those questions.

Oscar Gonzalez: 43:08

Leadership, as much as leadership, wants to have unique questions, etc. They're probably going to ask you roughly the same types of questions, so you build out your space to allow for those questions to be answered through metrics, reports etc. So that the question that actually does come is hey, I've noticed this over the past couple of weeks. Is this something that we have concern about? How do you think that we should approach this? Are we doing additional training to ensure that this doesn't become an issue in the future? Those are the kind of conversations we need to have, not hey, what's going on? Hey, I saw this. Can you update me on that? Can you update me on that?

Oscar Gonzalez: 43:56

Allow those data sets and those operational data frequencies, durations, dates, what have you sort of drive. What is really a topic of concern that leadership can address? Show them we're at a point. Oftentimes we wait for top down. Let's wait for leadership to ask us you have all the data, you do. Your team, your PPM tool has the data in this space. Start pushing that up. This is part of that managing up. Start pushing that up Instead of getting these ad hoc requests. They're driving you crazy. Now you're going to start pushing all those things to leadership, the ones that they're consistently asking for, and that's just being driven by day to day work.

Lawrence Wong: 44:50

Yeah. So you know, beautifully said, and I think we've spent, you know, much of this episode talking about the benefits of the PPM tool, how to deploy it, strategies around managing up and doing more, I would say, the process of the capabilities of the tools themselves, and also, how do you manage tools throughout the lifecycle of the tool. If somebody's listening right now and they are in a position where, let's say, they do have a PPM tool, what one thing they can do to determine how effective they are deploying it?

Oscar Gonzalez: 45:32

All right. So how effective is the deployment of the PPM tool? So these things take time. Now they should take a little bit less time for the group that is directly managing it. So the first things first.

Oscar Gonzalez: 45:49

I think where we get a little bit stuck is that and I've seen this before we just want everybody to use it right away, right now. And what happens? You get a bounce back. I don't know what's going on. What is this? I didn't get a training. Who's going to train me now?

Oscar Gonzalez: 46:05

And the person who has the most knowledge about that space does not have the capacity to train every single individual person in the organization. A one-hour training of the whole company is not going to help either. There's this constant feeding and refeeing. Could you imagine if you learned one lesson in calculus and was like okay, go on and do calculus. You probably understood a little bit about that, but there's no way that you're going to just continue to take on this complex mathematical equations, etc. This is the same thing. You're going to learn a little bit within that one hour, and it depends on whose training it is. Some people may train you on the theories behind it, how it works, and other people may just want to see how do I do what I need to do. I'm going to teach you how this actually works, because you need to understand how to think through when you want to create something or when you want to modify something.

Oscar Gonzalez: 47:03

The question is to start asking yourself I think it's very important rather than you look at some of these PPM tools and they mimic tools that we've used in the past Excel, word, etc. So it's important for us to create this team of champions. You have this one internal champion and then you get a couple of more people and you have this one team of champions that are within your department. Understanding that level of deployment there, I think, is critical. Then, when you look at your adoption, are you hearing it in the hallways? Are you hearing people say, oh yeah, I have a smart sheet for that. It's really cool, I'll share it to you. What does that look like? What does it sound like? Are you seeing people using smart sheet dashboards to represent current statuses, live, live data, live statuses? How is that PPM tool manifesting within the organization? You start to see what people are doing. I mean, I go down the hallways of clients and just see numerous people on PowerPoint slides. So, at the same token, I would expect to see in numerous people using a PPM tool because they're logging information, reviewing, etc.

Oscar Gonzalez: 48:24

So I would say you have to make sure that you build that core so strong and in there you allow and in discussing with these projects teams, you let them know that you guys are influencers. You guys are influencers when you start showing other people the work that you're doing and how fast and efficient it is. That is where that sort of curiosity starts to come in. I got a secret for you, lawrence, and for everybody else that's listening.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:00

People do not like to work hard. The work that you do can be challenging, but how you perform the work through PPM tools, it should not be your challenge. Your challenge should not be communicating what happened. Your challenge should not be recording things. Your challenge should not be finding a metric, locating a document, the work itself. The industry can have its challenges Biopharma, the science so much we don't know, so much we think we know we're wrong and we haven't figured that out yet. That stuff is hard Should not be just how we do our day-to-day work Should not be the challenge here, and unfortunately in a lot of places it is.

Lawrence Wong: 49:58

I think. To sum it up, I think the final message is, like you said, creating this support network so that you can foster these network effects. The more people that are using it, the more they're playing with it, the more things that they'll come up with and innovate in all sorts of ways for the way that they work. But you've got to have that leadership push from up above and say, hey, I'm going to invest and make this easier for people to use and not harder.

Oscar Gonzalez: 50:28

Right, because you're right, the work that we do should not be more difficult. Yeah, make a little competition. Hey, whoever has the best thing gets a dinner, gets a lunch at Cheesecake Factory on the company for the whole team, something like that, where it just really rallies people like, OK, guys, I think we could do this and it's going to improve our output by this.

Oscar Gonzalez: 50:51

We have to figure out some kind of competition or something like that Incentives exactly If we want that to happen. It's not going to happen by just saying make a goal to innovate the work that you're doing that, just because we want that, we have to cultivate that. We have to be responsible. Leaders have to be responsible to create the right environment for that to excel. If it really is a priority, if it's not, don't put it in a goal All right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 51:26

So, again, I love integrating it into the fabric of your work, and it's something that we do with Sigma Lab Consulting every day integrating this into the fabric of our work. So, like we said, your people, your tech, your process are key to navigating the change that is inevitable in the organization. Lawrence, thank you for your time. I hope our guests got something out of this. I enjoyed this time as well with you and we'll catch you next time.

Lawrence Wong: 52:01

Yeah, so good. And where can people find the white paper?

Oscar Gonzalez: 52:07

We'll put that right now it is a free white paper that is on SmartSheets' website, so we'll put the link in our show notes. The title of the white paper you might actually be able to Google it. It's IDC White Paper the Power of NextGen Project and Portfolio Management. So we'll put the link in the show notes and then you can download the white paper simply with just entering your name and email information. So we'll make that available to folks so they can download that.

Lawrence Wong: 52:38

All right.

Oscar Gonzalez: 52:38

Don't mind. Thanks, lawrence, take care.