Smartsheet Delivers 30 Percent Efficiency Gain for University of Utah Health

As the only academic health care system in its region, University of Utah Health is focused on the health and well-being of residents of six states. The system’s 14,000 faculty and staff provide patient care, medical research, and training for future professionals. Three employees in the Culture and System Integrity organization—a group which focuses on human resources and project management—are doing their part to enhance employee training and retention by using Smartsheet to automate and streamline processes, and increase collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness.

“Our department really focuses on the culture, bettering the patient’s experience while they’re here,” says manager Shannon Lingwall. In the past, the department found it challenging to remain cohesive as a team while using a platform that didn’t enable collaboration, was spreadsheet-based, allowed only one user at a time to make updates, and relied on time-consuming email to fill the gaps. That changed with Smartsheet. “The efficiencies that we gained from it are incredible,” says Lingwall. “We really saw about a 30 percent efficiency gain from my entire team.”

“Smartsheet took us from a manual tracking process to a much more automated, technologically advanced way than before,” says Ischa Jensen, who leads project management. With the automation, reporting, and dashboarding functionality of Smartsheet to track projects and resources, “we were able to have a much broader impact. At any given time, I can see exactly where every project is, who’s working on it, when it is expected to be completed, and when I can assign a new project to that resource. Smartsheet allows our project managers to spend more time working on the project than tracking the project.”

“I love the automated features, it’s just so seamless,” says Anita Willoughby, director of the 330-member department. “We really love the dashboards as well. One of the things that I have found so valuable is a dashboard that shows me, just at a glance, which project managers have bandwidth, which ones are overloaded—and that has been a tool I’ve needed for years.

“Those kinds of efficiencies have really helped us to be successful,” says Willoughby. “We can respond quickly, we’ve got the data, we can track it, and we’re just more efficient with Smartsheet.”

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