Pavilion Health expands internationally using Teamwork

Pavilion Health is a health administration consultancy and product development business with 3 offices worldwide and plans for further expansion. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, the company builds software solutions and provides analytic insights to healthcare providers to improve the quality and timeliness of health data so that they can enhance the care they provide to their patients.

We talked to Doug Henry, Managing Director, and Cliona O’Donovan, Head of Irish Operations, about how Teamwork has allowed the company expand into international markets by improving team and client collaboration.

Growing pains

Five years ago, Pavilion Health took on a new project that required more transparency and client engagement at every phase. The team needed the ability to give their client an accurate picture of how the project was progressing and get a clear sense of how they were completing certain tasks.

They quickly found that the platform they had been using to manage their projects wasn’t a good fit for this new endeavor. They needed a tool with more flexibility, as well as better privacy and permissions features. Remote team members needed to be able to complete tasks and interact with clients across multiple time zones, and they had to be able to give clients specific access to certain tasks without revealing all of the behind-the-scenes work their team was completing.

"It was really important for us to give our client true and honest updates at every stage of the project, without compromising on confidentiality. Being able to manage both the internal and external sides of their project was necessary on a structural level, too: it was important that their chosen software could support both their own way of working and that of their clients. This means that they needed a tool that could not only coordinate their own agile workflows and help them to manage their sprints, but also easily translate that process into a waterfall project format to match their customers’ preferences.

“We wanted to develop hybrid workflows that let us communicate effectively within our company but also keep customers satisfied by meeting their needs and their expectations,” Doug told us.

Room to expand

To address all of these issues, the Pavilion Health team turned to Teamwork. “It was crucial that the tool we chose was well received by not only our own team, but with clients as well,” Doug says. “We gave Teamwork a trial run with a couple of our clients and the software was a huge success. When all the feedback we were hearing was so positive, we decided to start using it to work with every client.”

Now each time Pavilion Health takes on a new project, they add clients to Teamwork as collaborators. They no longer have to send lengthy status update emails to clients; instead, clients get real-time access to project progress. “They can see all of the tasks tied to their project, and if they have any questions, they can just leave a comment,” Doug says.

As Managing Director of Pavilion Health, having one central place for all internal and client communications has helped Doug, too. “In my particular role, I need to stay up to date with the development of every project without being involved in every detail,” he says. Reporting features in Teamwork allow him to do exactly this, such as the Project Summary, which allows him to see metrics for entire projects at a glance. “Now if I need to dip into a particular project or the detail, I can go right in without any effort at all.”

This is especially important as Pavilion Health expands globally. “Since we’re on the other side of the globe to some of the teams we work with everyday, it’s important that we can work collaboratively with them as one,” he says, “particularly as we’re working day and night with each other’s time zone changes.”

Having the platform for that kind of communication has been critical to their expansion. “We’ve used Teamwork to set up a remote office for a team in a different timezone and location to everyone else,” Cliona says. “It was great for keeping track of tasks and having a common understanding of what needs to be done and when.”

Using Teamwork has also made it easier for Pavilion Health to partner with subcontractors who need direct access to information on projects they’re working on. Using the software’s privacy and permission settings, Pavilion Health can share specific information with these external vendors without revealing private project details.

The tools to thrive

Teamwork has allowed everyone at Pavilion Health to reclaim time for productive work by letting them focus on what’s really important. As Pavilion Health expands globally, having a centralized place to store everything means that every team member has up-to-date information whenever they need it, no matter where in the world they’re working from. Gone are the days of searching for files or chasing email conversations; with a shared platform, everyone is on the same page.

“From a risk register perspective, a file sharing perspective, a task tracking perspective, a resource management perspective, Teamwork gives everyone a view of how things are tracking dynamically,” Doug says. “We know exactly how and in what position things are going and we can manage it quite closely.”

Teamwork really shines when it comes to the reason that Pavilion Health chose the software in the first place: client engagement and relationships. Using the software, clients can effortlessly track progress and leave comments for the Pavilion Health team as questions arise.

Pavilion Health has been able to scale their business and now works with clients all over the world, from Australia to Asia, Europe, and North America. This kind of expansion is possible because Teamwork provides the company with a platform where they can work with clients across the globe as if they were sitting in the same room.

One of their biggest projects at the moment is in Ireland with the implementation of one of their data quality products into all public acute hospitals. Even though Pavilion Health’s project team is based in offices across the world, they’re able to deliver the solution because of the transparency and responsiveness that they can offer using Teamwork.

It’s improved how they strategize, too. “By putting together all of the tasks, you’re actually fine tuning your scope of work,” Cliona says. “You can really fine tune a project plan by working it through for everybody to see. Typically in the past a project manager managed everything whereas with this, everybody can manage everything in their own area. It makes it easier for control and knowing what’s going on.

“Without Teamwork, it would have been impossible to provide this level of service for such a demanding project,” Doug adds.