Speaker: Maha Rajagopalan, Head of Program Management Office, Device Technologies
Could you tell us your name, your job title, and how long you’ve worked with Device Technologies? What is your team responsible for?
Maha Rajagopalan: Hi I'm Maharaja Gopalan, Head of Program Management Office Device Technologies. Australia were leading medical technology providers, and we are an integral part of the health care industry, enabling superior patient outcomes. I've been with Device for just over two years, and my teams within the PMO have a four pronged responsibility of enabling business transformation, ensuring principal transitions, executing systems implementations and delivering continuous improvement. Clearly, we have a broad remit of initiatives to manage that result in both incremental and massive benefits realization.
How did Device Technologies first start using Smartsheet? What was the implementation process like?
Maha Rajagopalan: at Device Technologies, our journey with Smartsheet actually began with trying to find a replacement for Excel As a project management tool. The complexities of our business required a tool set that allowed the flexibility to morph to our client and hospital needs. Smart sheets has proven to be that perfect configurable toolkit that meets all of our requirements. The implementation process itself has had robust support from the Smartsheet team and they have really helped us build a PMO toolkit that is flexible and scalable. The Smartsheet, University and all the self help guides within the tools have helped the PMO team gain a quick grasp of the tool and how to use it. Within 12 months, we were fully enabled with all the tools needed to manage the full life cycle of a project from initiation to execution.
What impact has Smartsheet had on you / your team / the wider organisation?
Maha Rajagopalan: Smartsheet is aligned well with our Device values of innovation, collaboration, doing good business and ownership as a tool. Every project plan in Smartsheet has been easy to create and share to improve our collaboration within the organization, as well as externally with our stakeholders. We have had several of our CI champions take ownership for improvements and they have managed to keep their leaders and stakeholders updated of the improvements there, delivering by leveraging Smartsheet's dashboards using Smartsheet forms. We have had robust collaboration within the organization, seeking and providing input or feedback across various initiatives. Overall Smartsheet as the tool has enabled us to accelerate our ability to deliver the right business outcomes.
For you, what are the stand out Smartsheet uses / applications?
Maha Rajagopalan: The standout feature in Smartsheet is the intuitive ease of adoption and user interface, as well as the integrated capability of workflow automation. We all know, life has changed irrevocably post Covid19 in the new hybrid working model, these two features have helped us immensely in the PMO to deliver the right initiatives with robust collaboration, online or in person.
What are your future plans with Smartsheet in your role / organisation?
Maha Rajagopalan: Smartsheet has become an integral part of the PMO applications landscape at Device. We will look to integrate financial management and resource planning. In the coming years, we will continue to identify more use cases to further leverage Smartsheet across the organization as we ramp up the PMO delivery capabilities to suit the right business outcomes for our patients.
