IT Portfolio Management on a Budget

“Within pharmaceutical organizations, IT is a critical partner, managing multiple projects that influence everything from clinical trials to strategic decision-making. A successful IT team must effectively track resources, balance priorities, and respond quickly to technical issues—tasks that typically require robust (and often costly) project and portfolio management tools. For smaller companies, these costs can be prohibitive, even though resource management is more critical than ever”.

A small, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with limited resources needed a way to streamline the management and oversight of its IT project portfolio. Leadership sought a tool that provided real-time visibility into all active projects, enabling them to track progress, allocate resources efficiently, and generate actionable reports to guide strategic decisions.

Working with their limited resources, we designed and developed a low-cost, user-friendly solution utilizing SmartSheet, a software as a service (SaaS) project management tool that is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Office platform. It’s designed for smaller teams, with an easy-to-learn interface similar to a spreadsheet and mid-level project management functions, including forms, dashboards, customizable templates, and automations.

We developed project-based sheets that allowed team members to update task status, with automated calculations to track the impact of changes on budgets and resource allocations. The system also enabled tracking of risks, actions, decisions, and issues, along with project-level attributes. These updates were then rolled up into dynamic dashboards that gave leadership an instant view of each project’s health.

To provide portfolio-level visibility, we built custom dashboards showing key metrics across all IT initiatives. This empowered leadership to assess budget and resource utilization, identify risks early, and adjust priorities as needed.

Once the tools were in place, training for the team took less than a day, so leadership could immediately begin effectively tracking and managing their limited IT resources to align with their strategic priorities.