Micron Biomedical: from clinical development to executive reporting with GanttPRO
"GanttPRO felt simple and narrowly focused on Gantt chart planning, which was exactly what we needed."
A story about a clinical research company developing a first-of-its-kind medical product with GanttPRO.
Company overview
Company: Micron Biomedical
Roles interviewed: Pankaj Raghavan, Director of Operations and Project Management
Project types: clinical research and product development
External pressures: regulatory compliance, commercialization timelines, no direct market equivalent
Tool history: monday.com, Microsoft Project
Problems hinted at: complexity of Microsoft Project, poor Gantt chart functionality of monday.com
Summary
Company Background
What does your company focus on?
Micron Biomedical is a drug-delivery and pharmaceutical technology company focused on taking vaccines and therapeutics that traditionally require an injection and developing them into needle-free, dissolvable microarray products. The goal is to let people self-administer vaccines with a small patch, which reduces the need for healthcare visits and makes vaccinations more convenient and accessible. As clinical research can take three years or more, a single project involves multiple development phases and requires pharmaceutical testing and specialized teams.
One of Micron Biomedical’s main challenges is that the product does not yet exist on the market. “There is no comparable product to learn from, so we are building it for the first time. The process involves constant learning, adjusting, and refining as we advance and work toward something innovative.”
“Since our work involves patient testing, every project must undergo a thorough, lengthy process. A typical initiative lasts at least three years and goes through several phases, with strict safety rules for every stage due to the involvement of pharmaceutical products, vaccines, and human participants.”
Pankaj Raghavan, Director of Operations and Project Management, shares how GanttPRO helps him manage product and process development programs across Micron Biomedical.
One of my colleagues had nearly no experience with project management tools and he still learned GanttPRO pretty quickly.
Struggle
How did your approach look before GanttPRO?
Before choosing GanttPRO, Pankaj looked at several project management platforms, including Microsoft Project, monday.com, and Smartsheet.
“Monday.com didn’t let us create the clear Gantt charts we needed. Microsoft Project was less effective for collaboration and harder to work with. GanttPRO, on the other hand, felt simple and designed for Gantt chart planning.”
Solution
Pankaj primarily uses GanttPRO to build project plans with key milestones, track progress, and demonstrate that to the senior leadership, including the CTO, CFO, CEO, and board members.
“The project plan my team creates in GanttPRO serves as a presentation tool for my senior leadership. Another main function is project tracking: seeing where tasks are, following their progress, and closing them once completed.”Company projects often involve both internal teams and external partners while each initiative includes about eight to ten people across design, formulation, testing, quality, regulatory, and project management.
To keep everyone aligned, the team frequently uses the shared private link feature: “That’s one of the key features I use often. I create project plans and then share them online with others.”“One of my colleagues had nearly no experience with project management tools and he still learned GanttPRO pretty quickly. It’s the interface which makes getting into the functionality easy with no background required.”
Impact
What does your work look like now with GanttPRO?
“It serves exactly the purpose I intended.”
For the past two years, the platform has become the main workspace for creating timelines, exporting plans, and distributing them across the organization. By combining project tracking, Gantt chart visualization, PDF exports, and internal sharing in one workflow, GanttPRO provides the functions the team wanted.