B2B supplier of mobile and front-end technology mkodo achieves project consistency in Smartsheet to keep teams on top of their game

With over 20 years of delivering the best mobile apps and UX to sportsbook, casino and lottery operators, mkodo creates customised user experiences and award-winning apps and websites exclusively for sportsbook, casino and lottery operators while driving engagement, attracting new customers and increasing revenues.

Many online games are played alone, but their production is a team sport. To deliver apps and websites to sportsbook, casino, and lottery operators, mkodo teams work in tandem, using Smartsheet for collaboration and project management. “Our company designs, manufactures, and sells igaming apps globally, and it is growing rapidly,” shares Tracey Locke, Senior Digital Project Manager at mkodo. “We want to make sure that we're really getting to where we need to be in terms of good governance with our usage of tools, process mapping, and due diligence.”

Replacing many with one

When Locke joined a newly formed project management office (PMO), she was tasked with streamlining and standardising work, processes, and documentation across three teams.

“My first days in this role felt overwhelming,” she admits. “I had to update the ticketing tool, project management tool, collaboration tool, planning tool… and all of this on top of the endless emails to respond to and meetings to attend.”

Fortunately, the hassle of switching between different platforms to update and monitor project information was soon to be over. “Our parent company in Canada was already using Smartsheet PMO templates to collaborate, so we followed,” she says.

To ensure alignment, Locke’s Canadian colleagues shared their PMO templates, which she then adjusted to her teams’ purposes. The prebuilt sheets, reports, and dashboards help her stay updated on all managed projects' risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID). “In my work, there is endless information and processes to follow, many crises to avert,” explains Locke. “Smartsheet has this great dashboard functionality where project details can cascade up and be fully transparent to other teams in the company, such as finance, management, and human resources.”

With all real-time data in one place, Locke can see the full picture of the projects under her leadership and prioritise them efficiently.

“I can easily adjust the reports and use colour codes to see my three biggest or newest risks,” she says. “And because the system is very agile, we can add columns for whatever data we need, like risk status. It’s really user-friendly.”

A noiseless collaborative environment

Locke has invited all team members to work on the sheets and contribute their insights. “I suggested at PMO that all team members, whether project manager, scrum master, or business analyst, should have access to all the projects to stay current and contribute,” she says. “I don’t use the system to keep my record of RAID events and changes; I want it to become my team’s record.”

The increased participation of team members helps advance projects swiftly. “By collaborating through Smartsheet, we need fewer meetings, email trails, and Slack messages to keep things moving,” Locke confirms.

Keeping tabs to keep control

Data integrity provided by Smartsheet translates into improved accountability and more informed decisions. “We now have a bulk of data that allows us to prepare process maps based on evidence, rather than best practice, or someone's idea, or what they've done elsewhere,” Locke explains. “For example, I can explicitly see how many actions open and close each month.” 

Seeing how Smartsheet has helped her teams work more efficiently, Locke continues to educate colleagues from other departments about its benefits. “Some of my peers are manually putting data in every single day to get reports because they haven't got a tool that will automate report generation, and I told them that's a torturous and unsustainable way of working. Smartsheet provides a much better way.”

There’s still a long list of collaborative tools used at mkodo, which Locke hopes to replace in the future. “We want to keep using only modern, future-proof software that can easily integrate with Smartsheet as our primary project management platform,” she says. 

Other plans include using Smartsheet data accuracy and consistency to reach significant compliance milestones.

“Having all processes in place in Smartsheet means that I know we're already delivering on data governance and the due diligence behind it,” says Locke.

“This will help us achieve one of our great goals, which is obtaining ISO 27001 accreditation on information security, critical for an online company like ours.”

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