How to Get Results on Regulated Projects with Virtual Teams

Get helpful advice for managing virtual workforces in regulated environments and maintaining business continuity and continuous compliance.

As life sciences organizations around the globe are facing the need to have a remote workforce, new methods of working are needed to organize and manage those remote workers. The agility to embrace and execute this new way of working will help avoid a disruption to the continuity of business activities critical to the healthcare ecosystem.

At USDM, we’ve established a playbook for managing virtual workforces. We have spent more than 20 years helping our customers with their compliance and IT projects, using people who can effectively work from diverse, remote locations. Our tightly managed approach, supported by USDM’s Virtual PMO, delivers an efficient process that can be leveraged to ensure regulated projects are completed on time, with transparency and in compliance.

This webinar offers advice for managing virtual workforces in regulated environments and learning how to maintain business continuity and continuous compliance in these challenging times.

The discussion included:

• Best practices for managing virtual workforces in regulated environments
• Common mistakes to avoid when managing virtual teams
• Tools to maintain control and keep teams aligned
• How to start creating your virtual playbook

About the Presenters

Co-Founder and Head of People Vega focuses on recruiting the best people, developing USDM’s talent and cultivating the company culture where everyone is connected, inspired, and empowered to make an impact at our customers’ sites. Vega’s commitment to innovation in business and people has helped curate the best and brightest talent in the life sciences industry for USDM and our customers.

VP of Life Science Services and Solutions Diane has more than 29 years of experience in the life sciences industries. As a member of the senior management team at USDM, Diane leads a highly skilled team of implementation and compliance engineers and was instrumental in establishing USDM’s Regulatory Compliance focus.

Transcript

In this webinar, How to Get Results on Regulated Projects with Virtual Teams, we share best practices for managing virtual workforces in regulated environments, tools you can use to maintain control and keep teams aligned, common mistakes to avoid when managing virtual teams, and how to create your own virtual playbook. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Our presenters
Enabling virtual workforces
Communication
Framework, definitions, and pain points
Virtual PMO best practices
Project management best practices
Project logistics best practices
Compliance best practices
Functional software tools best practices
Mistakes to avoid
Case study

Our Presenters

Vega Finucan focuses on recruiting the best people, developing USDM’s talent, and cultivating a company culture where everyone feels connected, inspired, and empowered to make an impact on our customers.

Diane Gleinser has three decades of experience in the life sciences industry and leads a highly skilled team of implementation and compliance engineers. Over her tenure, Diane has mastered quality assurance, quality control validation, and regulatory compliance for R&D manufacturing and packaging, auditing under GMP, GLP, GCP regulations, and 21 CFR Part 11.

USDM Workforce

Host: USDM has been enabling virtual workforces for years. We have about 275 people in 40 locations throughout the world and, at the moment, we have about 250 active projects. Many of them are virtual, so we have stories to tell and advice to share with you, especially if you are just getting started in the virtual environment.

Vega Finucan: The topic is dealing with a work-from-home workforce and how to really maximize and optimize your teams to get those projects to completion.

Prior to COVID-19, we saw that many companies were starting to move their workforce to working from home. Teams were becoming more distributed with team members in different locations. Teleconferences are becoming the norm and in-person meetings are less common.

The response to COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions made a remote workforce happen very quickly and on a massive scale. There are additional variables that many of us are experiencing: multiple adults working from home, kids at home with minimal supervision, and emotional duress. We have some ideas to help you on some of those items. We also have a blog on our website about our experience implementing and managing virtual workforces. Let’s talk about how we can support you in this work-from-home scenario.

The bright side of this challenging time is that, by demonstrating how to manage a remote team more effectively, we can save costs in office space, have more work/life balance, commute less, and enjoy more flexibility. We can hire the best people and not worry about where they live. Ultimately, we can reduce our carbon footprint with fewer cars on the road.

Managing a virtual team for the first time?

Oftentimes on conference calls, we’ll hear stuff like:

• I can’t connect to the meeting.
• Can anyone hear me?
• I can’t see the slides.
• Sorry, I was talking on mute.

Virtual meetings reflect how we show up to the team as we’re managing projects and teams, setting ground rules, and doing more upfront work to ensure people know how to use the technology. Understanding expectations is more important than ever. For example:

• Showing up on time.
• Having a quiet and professional work environment.
• Being organized and engaged.
• Showing up with tasks completed.

Managers of virtual project management teams should also:

• Check in on team members to make sure they’re on track.
• Use video to further connect with people and bond the team.
• Ensure that the team knows how to use the camera and understands the video controls.

7-38-55 Rule of Personal Communication

Vega Finucan: With teams moving from in-person to virtual, we must think more about communication effectiveness. Dr. Albert Mehrabian has the 7-38-55 rule that states 55% of communication is body language. What is lost when there’s less face-to-face interaction? Much of the magic of project management is establishing relationships, building trust, and getting people to go above and beyond. The dynamics change when people don’t have the opportunity to go to lunch, pop by someone’s desk, or catch up at the water cooler. More conflicts can emerge as people misread emails and instant messages, and don’t get the chance to bond. The focus should be on more virtual team building, incorporating video into conference calls when you can, and encouraging people to pick up the phone instead of sending emails and instant messages. These things can go a long way to building relationships and improving communication.

Poll

Are you currently experiencing a virtual workforce situation for the first time?

• Not yet, but we are preparing: 0%
• No: 52.2%
• Yes: 47.8%

Host: Diane and Vega, what are your thoughts on this? Is this what we’re experiencing now with a lot of our customers?

Diane Gleinser: Yes, I think what we’re seeing is that a lot of our customers have been thrust into the virtual world, whether willingly or unwillingly. It’s nice to see that so many people have done some work-from-home at least. That’s a good sign because jumping into this as suddenly as we all had to, it’s a stressful event. If you haven’t ever worked from home, there is so much to think about.

Maybe you saw the video of the guy in his home office and his child is dancing and having a great time. If you work from home long enough, silly stuff will happen to you, too. All you can do is laugh, but it’s nice to see this.

There are a lot of people who don’t have any work-from-home experience, but almost an equal number who do.

Framework and Definitions

Vega Finucan: Virtual teams are teams working in different locations. Currently in the COVID world, most teams are working from home, but really the virtual team concept is not new. Some teams have been virtual, located in different locations, even though they haven’t been working from home.

I’ve managed a team in the past where there was a developer in Vienna, a validation lead in Chicago, a QA person in California, and various manufacturing sites around the world with business folks that needed to participate in the project. We collaborated using conference calls. We weren’t working from home, but we could have been.

The key to success in that project was the relationship building that we did. We had an in-person kickoff. Granted, that’s not really possible now, but leveraging video in your conference calls helps add that human element. Ultimately, with that distributed team, we were able to pull off the extremely tight timelines and deliver on time, and relationship building was key.

Regulated projects. Most of you on this call are dealing with a variety of regulated projects; anything from GxP system implementation/validation, SOP development, periodic review, remediation, supplier audit, and more.

A project management office (PMO) is the function that sets the standard for project management. It provides the methodology (agile or waterfall), it provides tools, and it provides templates to help project managers run those projects well. If your organization has a PMO, go there to get those tools and templates to help you be successful.

Regulated Projects Pain Points

Diane Gleinser: What are some of the pain points in regulated projects?

• Project teams require input from multiple stakeholders
• Adjunct team members with specialized expertise
• Team members decentralized
• Many project stakeholders requiring consensus
• Accuracy in project estimates (time resources, money)
• Unclear roles and responsibilities
• Lack of communication and miscommunication
• Lack of accountability
• Lack of standardized processes

There are a lot more than just these. As the project manager of a virtual project, you need to be on top of your project status and progress, understanding it, and being able to report on it. That makes communication incredibly valuable. With multiple stakeholders, you may have people around the world joining your conference calls and you need to have clear communication so that you can make sure that you’re staying organized and on top of things. Security is become a big issue. Maybe you’ve seen “Zoom bombing” in the news. Zoom meetings are being hijacked by people yelling racial slurs and flooding their calls with graphic content.

The FBI is reporting that a number of video conferences are being disrupted and it’s not just Zoom, it’s almost all of the video conference platforms. It’s becoming more widespread as more and more people start using video conferencing.

With any project there is scope creep. It’s the same in a virtual world as it is in a brick-and-mortar world. Scope creep, inflexible budgets that you’ve set early on in the project, you still have changes coming in. It’s easy to go talk to someone in the office, but how do you do that in this virtual environment we’re adapting to now? How do you make those changes and communicate them out to your team?

Organizational change management (OCM) communication is critical. Make sure that people know what their roles and responsibilities are, who’s accountable, and who’s responsible. If you don’t know who’s accountable for an end-product, a deliverable, or a task, then it leads to blame games: “Well, it wasn’t my job,” or “So-and-so didn’t do what they were supposed to do, so how can I do what I’m supposed to do?”

You might get duplicate efforts, which is not productive, and you may see an overall drop in productivity. You need to have very clear control, set expectations, and define roles and responsibilities for each individual so that it makes the process more smooth. I can’t stress enough, miscommunication is so easy. I think everybody has an example of an email where they mistook the tone of the message.

You can’t see people’s body language on the phone or in an email, so it’s easy to misinterpret something that you heard. Be very clear and direct; the more direct you are, the better off you’re going to be in this virtual world. Don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call someone. Use the right tools to make sure that you can see when people are available and when they’re not so that you’re not making unnecessary calls and wasting time.

Best practices for a PMO

Diane Gleinser: When you’re using a virtual PMO, especially in a regulated world, make sure that you have the appropriate processes in place and that you have access to those processes. You may need to have a separate place where you can set up your SOPs so that people have ready access to them and don’t have to go hunting for them. You need the right templates. You need the right tools for adaptability to virtual management and your upcoming needs. Make sure you have them upfront and continue to verify that they’re still accurate throughout your process. If somebody is waiting for a template or an SOP, you’ve lost productivity, you’ve lost time, they’ve gone on to something else. Try to prepare several days ahead of time so that you don’t have that lag in time. Make sure you have a project plan that people can see.

We’ll talk more about tools a little bit later, but there are a number of virtual tools that you can use to help you communicate project deadlines, when deliverables are due, and when tasks are due. Report on the status regularly, at least weekly, so that your team is always up to date. Make sure you’re sharing status reports. Not only do you need to communicate to management so they see that you’re you are organized and the effort is going smoothly, you need to communicate to the rest of the team, too. Status reports should be for everyone. Have a communication strategy. The cadence for regular meetings is critical to keeping people on task and on time, and within the budget you’ve set.

You might schedule daily standup meetings as things get critical. You might have a weekly status meetings, and there should be real-time transparency so that team members know what the dependencies are for their tasks and that those dependent tasks have been accomplished. Now they can do what they need to do on time.

Having a content management system that everyone can access online is critical. People should be updating documents at the end of every business day because computers crash, technology isn’t perfect, and you can lose a whole lot of time and effort if work isn’t saved to a safe place. Be prepared and use risk-management tools and techniques for your critical information.

Again, make sure that roles and responsibilities for tasks and deliverables are clearly spelled out. Who’s ultimately accountable? The project manager is going to be the most responsible and accountable, but they’re not going to be the one who’s doing all of the work. Make sure people understand when their documents are due and when the deliverables are due, and make sure they can access them quickly. We’re going to say “communication” a million times, but that’s what’s going to make this project and this virtual world more successful.

You might have consistent training and coaching for project managers as well as for project resources. Online training is available. Make sure that you have access to your own learning management system, if you have one.

Do proficiency testing. It’s hard to see in a virtual world who’s not performing until they haven’t performed, and you can head it off with the right tools and the right amount of monitoring. Monitor people so you know they are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Keep track of that, because if you discover that someone’s not doing what they were trained to do, or they’re not doing it correctly, you may have lost a lot of time, effort, and money because you didn’t monitor them.

Have the right people on the right assignment. This is a lot easier to see when you’re working with them day-to-day, in person. It’s a lot harder to see when you’re working virtually. That is another reason to upload documentation daily, whether or not it is complete, so that you can monitor progress and not give them so much time to move in the wrong direction.

Tracking hours. Are you getting the right productivity and the right amount of information for the hours being spent? It’s a lot more difficult for those who are doing the document and task creation and deliverables to make sure that they stay on task and on track. Make sure they are tracking their hours and that you are looking at them regularly, not just at the end of a timekeeping period. Ensure that you are keeping them busy with their allocated tasks.

Vega Finucan: One comment on training project managers; in this COVID era, people have a lot of other stresses and stuff at home to deal with, so schedule extra check-ins. Make sure project managers have been coached on project management in the virtual world where everyone is working remotely. Check in with people to understand where they’re at.

Project Management Best Practices

Diane Gleinser: These best practices apply to all project management, not just in the regulated world.

Get executive approval and support for your virtual project. If you’re going to continue to work virtually, which I expect a lot of people will continue to do, it’s important to have senior-level management supporting what you’re doing. Show them that you are effective and efficient with virtual projects.

Have an established scope, timeline, and budget. Keep in mind, especially in a virtual environment where people may have kids, elderly parents living with them, or other distractions, if at all possible, allow a little extra time for tasks to be completed because it’s going to take time for them to adapt to this new way of working.

Test how well your team is operating. Until you know that, don’t create hard-and-fast deadlines. Or, set deadlines a little earlier so that you have some leeway and you’re not punishing people for things that are out of their control.

Know who you’re dealing with and understand who your team is. As Vega said, interaction with your teammates is more difficult in the virtual world, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

The phone is a great way to communicate. We all know that we communicate well with our friends, do the same with your teammates. Call and ask them how they’re doing it. It shouldn’t just be about work; establish that relationship with your teammates so that you understand what they’re dealing with. By doing that, you’ll be able to react in a better way when things do head a little bit sideways.

How are you going to demonstrate that your team is in control? By creating that relationship, by understanding how you work them, and by understanding how they work, you create a better atmosphere for them and for project managers.

Build a culture of accountability and trust and make sure there are clear roles and responsibilities. What are the metrics that you can use? Are they getting tasks done on time? Not getting them done on time is certainly a metric you could use, but what metrics could you use to make sure that they get done on time?

Don’t just look for the end goal; if you do that, you’re going to consistently be behind. Monitor, communicate expectations, and do it frequently. They say adults need about seven touches to learn something. Keep that in mind as you’re dealing with people who are adapting to this new environment and don’t get frustrated.

Make sure that you have the right stakeholders involved in your meetings. You might need to invite Quality to more meetings. They may need to be more involved to ensure that you are following your processes and procedures.

As you move out of a more visible role and you’re working from home, give stakeholders that level of security they need that the project is going smoothly and that you’re complying with your internal processes.

Make SOPs and procedures available to your team in a collaborative environment so they can easily access them. If it takes them 30 minutes to find something, they’re not going to go find it. They’re going to do what they think they should do. Be aware of what people need; stay ahead of the game on that. Make sure they have what they need to be successful.

Keep up to date on the dependencies for your task. Understand what dependencies exist for tasks and deliverables in a regulated environment and communicate them to your people so that everybody knows when they need to start their contribution. Don’t leave them hanging and guessing. That’s a sure recipe for failure.

Poll

How many projects are you managing or planning to manage remotely?

• None yet: 8.9%
• 1-3 projects: 35.6%
• 4-6 projects: 44.4%
• More than 7 projects: 11.1%

Diane Gleinser: When there are a lot of people and a lot of projects, it’s a lot more difficult to manage when you’re in a virtual environment because there might be different rules and regulations for each project. They might be in different areas of the company and that becomes a challenge to make sure that you’re adapting and switching gears to make sure you’re spending appropriate amounts of time on each. People are dealing with some very difficult, stressful situations here.

Vega Finucan: Once you understand the project team you’re working with, you understand what they can handle. And when you have another team, then you need to understand what they can handle and how they work. You need to understand how the Quality person interfaces and what their needs are. People are handling a lot right now.

Diane Gleinser: For the people working on seven projects, we’re really sorry!

Host: For those who answered, “None yet,” do you have tips for them?

Vega Finucan: You could start with finding out if your company has a PMO, what their methodology is, and what tools and templates they have to help you get ready.

Project Logistics Best Practices

Vega Finucan: Training. Identify what kind of materials are available. If you’re working on a particular system, gather materials from the vendor or from training that you’ve done internally. Record training sessions with one of the business representatives talking about how to use the business processes they have and what their priorities are. Record as much as you can. Many of the collaboration tools have the option to record so you don’t have to ask questions over and over again. Gather materials that will help with easy ramp-up for your team.

Equipment. Working from home is not just having a laptop. I have two monitors, my own keyboard, and a separate mouse. If you’re at home just working on a laptop, that’s rough. Having a good set up is key. Think about the folks on your team; if you’re a project manager, do your team members have what they need? Do they have multiple monitors? Maybe you need to put in a special request, but that step pays dividends.

Time zones and working hours. Grant some flexibility because there are a lot of additional challenges we’re faced with at home, but there still should be agreed-upon work hours. That is critical. We like maintain a contact list with (potentially) home phone numbers, cell numbers, email addresses, and stuff that you’re not necessarily going to be able to pull from your company directory. Put it into a spreadsheet, make sure working hours are listed, along with any planned time off. I’m sure none of us are going to the South Pacific on vacation now, but maybe we’re still planning some time off. Have all of that contact information in one place. It’ll be less frustrating when people are trying to get ahold of your team.

At USDM, when we send out equipment to our team, everything is pre-installed and we verify it, and we are checking to make sure that, based on the role of the person, they can do everything they need to do.

When a new person starts, we schedule LMS training, and have our Director of People confirm that they have their computer, they can log in, and they’re able to navigate around and get started. There’s less anxiety for the new hires. You may not be hiring right now, but if you do, having someone connect with them when they’re starting is key. It’s going to make them feel a lot more comfortable.

Mentors. A mentor can be anyone in the organization that a new hire can go to with issues or questions. It might be on a personnel level, or it might be on how to use equipment or software.

Online orientation. At USDM, we pull together our new hires for a chance to communicate with some other people and it kicks off the new hires quite nicely.

Compliance Best Practices

Diane Gleinser: A lot of us on this call work in a regulated environment and, as we said earlier, the environment’s changing. We’ve been thrust into an environment where we thought it was great to be working from home; the best of all worlds. But in reality, you live at work.

What are the tools that you can use to help you adapt to a virtual environment? What are some of the things that you can do? What are the methodologies that you can use? Many of the regulations today are changing. EU MDR regulations have been updated for medical devices. If you’re in a medical device company, MDSAP—the one audit for medical device firms—allows for less interaction but a more robust audit that’s accepted by many of the regulatory bodies. There are a number of methodologies out there that can guide you or show you how to achieve and maintain control.

These best practices are usable whether you are working in a virtual environment or in your office. Things like GAMP5 gives you guidelines for ensuring compliance, supplier management, compliant risk management, and risk management tools that you can leverage to determine where your highest focus areas should be. Things like computer software assurance, the new regulation or the new guideline that is expected to come out in September 2020 [now expected December 2021] from the FDA that gives you more effective and efficient tools to use, and methodologies to use for computer systems validation. A lot of the regulations are changing and a lot of them are changing quickly. Even in the last couple of weeks, the FDA relaxed a lot of their regulations so that we can get more medical supplies, more drugs to the market, more test kits to the market more effectively, efficiently, and quickly to deal with the current pandemic.

Think about the tools that you use today and what else is available in this changing environment. Stay on top of things as they change, because the changes are coming fairly quickly right now. Know what you’re doing, know what’s happening, but think about the methodologies that you’re deploying for things like validation, audits, and compliance. Can you do an audit in a virtual world? Yes, you can. It may not be quite as effective, but there are certain ways to make it as effective. Use them.

Functional Software Tools Best Practices

Diane Gleinser: Virtual collaboration. USDM has lived in the virtual world for 20 years now, but a lot of you haven’t, so make sure that you have virtual collaborative tools. Many of you already have Office 365, so you may have access to Microsoft Teams. If you have Salesforce, you can use the Chatter function. You might have Box for cloud content management. You may have DocuSign for electronic signature functionality that’s already in use by some departments. Get these collaboration tools communicated across all departments because they will make you successful in a virtual environment.

Electronic signature. When you have to send documentation around for approval, how are you going to get it approved? A lot of us don’t have fax machines anymore. Taking a picture with your phone and emailing is one way, but not the most effective way. How do you do things in a secure, compliant manner? If you’re working in a regulated industry, there are tools to help you do this.

Project management. Microsoft Project has been used for years. Most people don’t understand what it does yet, but there are collaborative ways to use it. Smartsheet was introduced a few years back. It’s a valuable tool for managing projects and collaboration, with things like action trackers. You and your team can know at a glance who is doing what, and you can report to your superiors and your leadership team efficiently and accurately. What items are outstanding? Where are your roadblocks? What’s going wrong? What’s going right? Those are important things to be tracking on a regular basis.

Content collaboration and management. Have a content management site that everybody can access, like Veeva, SharePoint, or Box. These are great collaborative tools for making sure that everybody can quickly access the information that they need.

Test management, automated testing tools. These help make validation efforts more accessible to a virtual world. These are tools that support your validation efforts. When you combine them with the ability to use the computer software assurance methodology, this is a huge step forward in efficiency for validating the tools that you have on hand, as well as the systems that you need to use in a regulated environment.

Metric tracking. It’s important that people be able to see progress and they can’t see it all the time. You can talk about it, but I know that at USDM, we have a lot of different dashboards. Track metrics so people can see progress; seeing success is the impetus for continued success. If they don’t see the successes, it can be pretty depressing, so use metric tools to track and to show everybody where they are at any point in time.

Poll

What is your biggest struggle with working remotely?

• Collaborating and/or communication: 46.7%
• Different time zones than teammates: 20%
• Distractions at home: 33.3%
• Staying motivated: 26.7%
• Loneliness: 10%
• Unplugging after work: 30%
• Reliable internet: 13.3%
• Reliable tools to work remotely16.7%
• Other: 13.3%

Host: It looks like about half of us struggle with collaborating and/or communication, not a big surprise there.

Vega Finucan: Absolutely. And I think the reality is that there are multiple reasons, right? For those with kids, now you need somebody to watch the children. Maybe that’s going to affect your availability and you have to figure out your routine and your schedule.

The other thing is learning new ways to communicate and collaborate with people. Putting some of those ideas in place might help.

Diane Gleinser: Not everybody understands loneliness. Some people don’t have any distractions and that can be as big a problem as having distractions because you don’t have anybody to turn around and talk to. People are busy; other people are busy when you’re trying to call them. It’s a real problem.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to people. Having open lines of communication with your virtual team is critical.

Mistakes to Avoid

Diane Gleinser: Perfection is really not an option here; there is no perfect virtual world. But there are some common mistakes that we’ve seen in working in a virtual environment. Think about these things and how you will address them in a proactive manner, because addressing these upfront will help you get the most out of your team.

Lack of communication. A lack of communication and regular meetings is probably one of the biggest causes of project failure in the virtual environment. People depend on meetings and communication.

Lack of consensus early in the process and having the right stakeholders involved from the beginning. Not every stakeholder in a regulated or a non-regulated project has to be involved in every meeting, but they need to be involved when it counts. So put the meeting out there to everybody and reserve it on their calendars. If somebody doesn’t need to attend, save them the effort of calling in. You can tell them to take it off their calendar if they want to, but that ensures that people have already reserved the time and they’re planning on being there when it’s necessary.

Lack of a centralized, transparent, updated project tracking tool. This is part of communication. People need to know when things are due. They need to know when something is expected of them, and when they should start working on something if somebody else has to finish their task first. Ensuring that everybody has access to that tool and knows how to read it is a critical piece of project success.

Not having a contingency plan. Project delays are going to happen. People get pulled from one team to another one, and you lose resources. Maybe you’re going to gain some resources. What happens when your project is delayed? How are you going to get things back on track? Have a Plan B.

Not setting clear roles and responsibilities. This will lead to project chaos. Two people doing the same thing will do it differently. You’ve got nobody to work on something that needs to be done. Set clear roles, assign tasks, and make sure people know when one person’s accountable and another person’s responsible. Make sure they know exactly what they’re responsible for and what their tasks are.

Not making decisions when decisions are needed. This becomes a lot harder in a virtual world. We’ve got to be able to make decisions and that should be an expectation right from the start. Not making decisions when they’re needed, you’ll see project delays, and you need to include that in your contingency plan.

Not closely monitoring performance, lack of coaching, or poor performance correction. People have good intentions; they usually don’t intend to move down the wrong path, but it happens because communication is difficult. Make sure you’re monitoring performance. Look at documentation. Don’t give people a chance to go too far down the wrong path. If they need more coaching, make sure it’s available to them. People can’t fix something they don’t know about. Be open and honest. You don’t have to be cruel, but be open and honest when something’s not going well and give them a chance to correct what’s wrong.

Lack of the right tools for collaboration, document approvals, and signatures. This will delay, delay, delay. It may prevent the project from wrapping up on time. Make sure that you have the right tools in place.

Creating a Virtual Playbook

Vega Finucan: Some key points for remote work are that you just can’t keep doing virtually what you were doing on-site. You need extra touch points and communication. Stay on top of progress tracking, status report techniques, and checking the project repository where people upload their work. Make sure you are prioritizing tools for e-Signatures and collaboration.

Case Study: On-site and Remote On-Demand Compliance Staff Augmentation

Vega Finucan: We have a case study for a partner that we’ve been working with for more than two years. They have an R&D supply chain software product. We provided them a team of 10 people and had two workstreams. One supported the software releases and quality assurance. In that workstream, we helped them implement and roll out an Okta Single Sign On solution (which happened to leverage our partner network because we’re partners with Okta). The second workstream focused on customer implementation. We customized the deployments, supported their rollouts, and ensured the customer releases were compliant and that the customers got what they needed.

With this flexible model, we were able to ramp up and down to support them as needed and help them become more efficient with their validation, use a risk-based approach, and maintain a library of our scripts.

How can USDM help

Vega Finucan: We would love to transform your infrastructure and tools, support your team, and help you build out your PMO. We’ve been running projects for over 20 years and are available for you.