CTG Streamlines Project Management With SharePoint for a Clinical Advisory Provider

The client is a Clinical Research advisor and safety consultant. It plays a pivotal role in helping pharmaceutical companies carry out clinical trials while ensuring the entire process’s integrity and simplifying drafting the data for publication, submission and approval.

The Challenge and Opportunity

The organization carries out the due diligence for these trials with the help of its full-service Endpoint Adjuration Committee and Data Monitoring Committee. They lacked a high-level project management solution that would allow various stakeholders to stay aware of their various projects, gain clarity on the deadlines, and work accordingly to complete their tasks. This lack of clarity and inability to prioritize projects was the problem that needed to be addressed.

Ideally, the personnel are supposed to be mapped to their respective tasks, but there was a lack of streamlined process that complicated allocation and acknowledgement of these tasks by the respective stakeholders. There was also a major lack of avenues to enable project managers and higher management to observe and analyze the ongoing projects.

Simply put, there was no provision to trace the progress of the project or retrieve any reports centrally, as the data is available in files over a shared network folder. Lack of this transparency was hurting the entire process, not to mention, causing delays and pressure on the team. 

What Was The Client Looking For?

The client was looking for a solution that would bring all the stakeholders of the respective projects on one common platform. In addition to bringing in transparency, they also wanted to integrate this new solution with their Microsoft Outlook for a task and reminder management directly linked with their Central Project and Task Repository. The solution should also be able to allow project managers to overview the task without fleeting across documents and folders and rather locate them in one place.

Why Did They Approach CTG? 

CTG's expertise in SharePoint solutions, combined with the ability to understand requirements and spot missed loopholes—all integrated with an interactive User Design experience—made us the ideal partner. In fact, we have provided the client with SharePoint solutions since 2015, helping them adapt to the latest industrial trends with relevant upgrades. 

The Solution and Results

To develop a streamlined process to track the project activities, CTG created a framework that involved Projects (preliminaries), Meetings (inward/outer), and Tasks (pre/post-meeting errands). Tasks comprised individual stakeholders based on their roles in the task. The Project Managers, as well as higher management, could now follow the work process via the interactive BI dashboard and analyze the progress.

Every meeting requires some preparatory stages by different stakeholders—statisticians, project coordinators, project managers, and others—but here the tasks were not clear. With the introduction of templatized meetings by CTG, scheduling them to their respective stakeholders was now easier for project managers.

The framework also gave highlights to naturally characterize assignments dependent on the kind of meeting (pre and post-meeting errands). Team members working on these tasks were slotted in respective projects and received reminders on mail which was synced to Outlook.

In the span of 12-16 weeks, this complete set up was implemented using SharePoint Online as well as MS Azure to maintain the relevance of the project and also allow the flexibility to contain future developments as well as disruptions. Moreover, the Azure integration also enabled the customer to be benefitted by its specific components like Timers, Functions, Service Bus Queues, Azure Active Directory, and on-prem integrations to connect to on-prem AD. 

The entire process was centrally optimized which, enabled on-time deliveries of the projects as well as transparency in operations.

Features Implemented

• The novel SharePoint platform was upgraded with the latest features that provided a value-added advantage to their daily tasks.
• Secured access to portal and data (low-level/row-level dynamic access controls to projects, meetings, tasks and artifacts)
• Templatized solution allowing the client to extend and create newer types of projects and monitoring committee capabilities
• Automated creation of tasks based on meetings and overridable parameters (dates, people, roles, capability to include additional ad-hoc tasks)
• Minutes of Meeting management
• Secure audit trails required to manage clinical data
• Dynamic dashboards for various stakeholders – Top Management, Project Managers, Team Members (shared across projects)

Key Takeaways

• CTG delivered a solution that made task management transparent and process-oriented
• Project stakeholders were able to access documents and data in real-time
• Senior-level management and project managers could now view the projects with the help of an interactive BI Dashboard
• The solution is now flexible and can support future updates easily

Future Outlook

While we continue to help our client with the latest SharePoint solution upgrades, we plan on migrating the data from external non-domain users to the doctors and clinicians who are carrying out the trials, enabling data accessibility for them.