Virginia Commonwealth University: bringing WBS structure to a long-running healthcare project with GanttPRO
“I had looked at other cloud-based products and felt like GanttPRO had a reasonable ratio of performance, price, and functionality.”
A story about how GanttPRO supports the management of a single complex healthcare project over several years.
Company overview
Company: Virginia Commonwealth University
Roles interviewed: Danny Mallory, Project Lead
Project types: a long-running project with a complex structure of tasks and subtasks
External pressures: many parties involved each with their own responsibilities, tools, and project managers, dependency pressure
Tool history: monday.com
Problems hinted at: limitations of previous tool
Summary
Company Background
What does your company focus on?
Virginia Commonwealth University is a nationally recognized public research institution dedicated to advanced care, clinical research, and innovation in medicine. With a core mission to preserve and restore health, the organization identifies the causes of disease, develops cures through research, and educates professionals who serve humanity.
Danny Mallory, Project Manager for VCU’s Research Imaging project, shared how GanttPRO helps break down this long-running initiative into manageable parts.
“There were certain moments with the previous tool when the progress I’d made was erased due to some software issues. In this regard, I find GanttPRO reliable.”
Struggle
How did your approach look before GanttPRO?
Danny has been managing the Research Imaging initiative in GanttPRO for the past two years. Before making it a part of his workflow, he also tested monday.com which did not provide the transparency and reliability he needed.
“About 10 years ago I had experience with Excel and the software at that time was pretty limited. So when I got back into project management, I wanted something modern, up-to-date. Before I came across GanttPRO, I tested monday.com and that tool did not perform well for me. The views lacked clarity and there were some limitations with dependency functions.”
Danny noted that, compared with his previous experience, reliability was another major factor in the decision. GanttPRO brought him a more stable environment without the risks of losing work due to technical errors.
“There were certain moments with the previous tool when the progress I’d made was erased due to some software issues. In this regard, I find GanttPRO reliable.”
“I had looked at other cloud-based products and felt like GanttPRO had a reasonable ratio of performance, price and functionality.”
Solution
Since the Research Imaging Center project is highly layered, GanttPRO brought control through the work breakdown structure by fragmenting the overall scope into smaller and more manageable elements.
“I wish I used the tool on a daily basis. For now, GanttPRO gives me a WBS-based method that helps me estimate the full scale and break the structure down into smaller parts, which is essential when dealing with such extensive work.”A key part of Danny’s workflow is that it’s shaped by a variety of internal parties, which makes staying aligned with other managers and seeing the connections between different workstreams critical. In this case, a hierarchy of tasks and subtasks connected through task dependencies helps him manage this complex ecosystem with greater control and visibility.
Impact
What does your work look like now with GanttPRO?
GanttPRO’s impact is reflected in the way it provides a clear structure for organizing complex, multi-layered work, understanding what needs to be done, and maintaining visibility into the overall project. For Danny, as the project lead, the tool serves as a strategic planning environment that brings the scope, deliverables, and structure together in one place.