DeNova: coordinating advanced biotech projects across multiple stakeholders with GanttPRO
“When I joined the company, I said: ‘Let’s save time.’ I did a study, and I’m pretty confident GanttPRO is what works best.”
A story about GanttPRO bringing coordination and accessibility to complex biotech projects across multiple stakeholders.
Company overview
Company: DeNova
Roles interviewed: Zachary Sun, Senior Director of Projects & Engineering
Project types: complex R&D biotechnological projects
External pressures: multiple internal and external stakeholders involved
Tool history: Microsoft Project
Problems hinted at: gaps in collaboration and user experience in previous tools
Summary
Company Background
What does your company focus on?
DeNova is a startup biotechnological company in the aqua feed nutrition and animal nutrition fields. The company has a strong focus on research and development and, over the past two years, has been scaling its laboratory-based technology into a larger facility.
Zachary Sun, Senior Director of Projects & Engineering, who is responsible for that growing commercial facility shared how GanttPRO is integrated into planning and execution processes, and why it’s a big part of DeNova’s workflow.
When I joined the company, I said: ‘Let’s save time.’ I did a study, and I’m pretty confident GanttPRO is what works best.
Struggle
How did your approach look before GanttPRO?
Zachary discovered GanttPRO before he joined DeNova when he was getting into larger project management as a project director. Now, it’s been almost 5 years since the tool became his main way of conducting project coordination work.
As Zachary recalls: “I was researching for a well-rounded and cloud-based project management tool that's easily accessible and shareable. I've actually done some significant digging into the markets and everyone's default at the time was Microsoft Project. It was released in its online version and the moment I tried it, I found it very lacking as it was nowhere near the full feature and the functionalities of the desktop one. So the desktop, although very powerful, was really not meant for cloud-based collaboration. So I kept searching, came across Monday, Clickup and quite a few more, but among all of them GanttPRO was the most straightforward.”
For Zachary GanttPRO was as full as the Microsoft’s product but accessible anywhere and shareable to multiple stakeholders which was extremely important. “What I can say off the top of my head is that your ability to share is way more powerful than MS Project.”
“When I joined the company, the team was also looking for a project management software. And I said, you know, save us time. I've done a study and I'm pretty confident GanttPRO is what works the best.”
Solution
One of the DeNova’s main workflow specifics includes multiple internal and external stakeholders like engineering companies, consulting firms, and industrial advisors all requiring access for project tracking. And that’s exactly why collaboration and reporting were two main priorities in choosing a tool.
“Stakeholders don’t usually need to get into details much, as well as executives, they just want to click on the link and see the full picture together with highlights. It’s also important that sharing provides not just a snapshot, but a latest version which changes live.”
“Giving access is essential, and, in my view, it should have an option to be limited as it's not like a Word document. It's actually against project management to give people access freely because it ends up messing up the project. There are pilots and there are co-pilots on project managing, creation, and assigning tasks.”Even though collaboration via link is the team's most frequently used feature, sometimes export is needed as well. “I always scratch my head when I try to export something as a complete visual from Microsoft. And the way GanttPRO’s export works is very beautiful. It can be PDF, JPEG, Excel, whatever you want.”
Dependencies between project elements were another significant functionality Zachary appreciated: “GanttPRO’s abilities in creating dependencies are very powerful and flexible. Different scenarios, start or end, lags or delays, these sorts of things are very easy to manage and set up. You would expect a Gantt-based project managing tool to have that as a default feature, but to my knowledge, not everyone offers that. Some may seem very flashy on the surface, but I think GanttPROo is polished enough in terms of both the look and function. I remember testing either Monday or ClickUp. It's just not intuitive enough how they build interdependencies between tasks.”
Impact
What does your work look like now with GanttPRO?
Today, GanttPRO serves as the main tool across each level of the structure: for daily planning and updates among lead managers, for quick high-level status checks for stakeholders and executives without going into too much detail, and small-team reporting for leads and scientists in the R&D segment. The rest have only visual access to check the current status.
With everyone seeing the same live project picture at the right level of detail, coordination becomes faster and more structured. This is especially important in DeNova’s environment, where multiple stakeholders need visibility without disrupting execution.