Key facts

Company
Orion Health

Website
www.orionhealth.com

Industry
Healthcare Software

Use Case
Product Roadmaps

Key results

  • Improved communication across teams and global locations
  • Helped secure executive buy-in more easily
  • Allowed managers to spot issues earlier
  • Helped teams worldwide better plan their strategies

    • Overview

    Orion Health develops software solutions for healthcare organizations worldwide, helping to improve the care of 35 million patients. Founded in New Zealand in 1993, Orion Health’s 1,000 clients include UCLA Medical Center and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The company has 27 offices in nearly every region of the world.

    Mark Robertson

    The product roadmaps we’ve created with ProductPlan make it so much easier to quickly communicate information across teams.

    Mark Robertson, Strategic Project Manager

    Challenge

    The product teams had difficulty effectively communicating product strategy and vision to various teams because the important information was buried among the details.

    Solution

    With ProductPlan, the team can create clean, visual roadmaps to easily communicate vision and strategy to stakeholders across the company’s many teams and regions.

    Results

    ProductPlan has improved product-development communication and information flow across the company, giving stakeholders more transparency into the product vision.

    We can finally share the big picture in one place.

    The Wrong Communication Tools for Roadmap Decisions

    As Strategic Project Manager for Orion Health, Mark Robertson had the difficult task of keeping many internal constituencies — developers, sales reps, senior managers and other stakeholders — on the same page with regard to the many product updates and new applications the company was rolling out. To make things trickier, the teams are spread out, with offices across North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

    “Making sure everyone knew what was going on with all of these initiatives was difficult,” says Mark. “It didn’t make things easier that we were using highly detailed tools like JIRA, Excel® and an internal wiki to track everything. Sure, if a salesperson in the US or an executive in New Zealand knew exactly where to look, they could figure out what was going on. But otherwise we really had no way of quickly communicating the high-level view of our ongoing projects.”

    A Search for the Right Roadmap Software Leads to ProductPlan

    Mark was on the team tasked with sourcing better tools for the various aspects of development — including, if he could find it, product roadmap software. “Most tools claiming to do roadmaps were cumbersome, hard to set up, and complicated to manage. I knew we’d end up not using them,” Mark explains. “But ProductPlan was a clean, visual roadmap tool — and it was so intuitive that you could start using it in minutes.”

    ProductPlan gives any of us in the company — no matter what team or part of the world — a common place to start a conversation about a project.

    Improved Roadmaps Lead to Improved Workflow

    Thanks to ProductPlan’s high-level view of the company’s products in development, Mark — as well as the other managers and even sales reps now using the tool — can plan more efficiently, communicate key issues and goals to others more effectively, and spot and fix potential problems earlier in the process. “Simply put, ProductPlan helps me to be more productive and effective,” he says.

    ProductPlan has proven so useful across Orion Health that it has inspired various teams to use it for other strategic purposes. “Our head of pre-sales in EMEA uses ProductPlan to map out that region’s delivery roadmap, so they’re better able to sell. And our managers in other regions, like the US or UK, check in with ProductPlan to quickly find out when a product will be released. It’s great that we can finally share the big picture in one place.”

    ProductPlan Wins Support Across the Organization

    “Here’s an example of what we were up against with our old approach,” Mark says. “Our security team wanted to propose a new process, and we needed management buy-in. So they built a 12-column Excel spreadsheet to present the idea. When the steering committee saw it, their eyes glazed over, and they assumed we had no plan — because we weren’t visually depicting it for them.”

    So Mark took the same proposed process and built a strategic, visual representation in ProductPlan. “This time the stakeholders got it right away,” says Mark. “We haven’t gone back to our old Excel model since!”