Turning Manual Reporting Into Real-Time Stakeholder Tracking

Overview

Client: Cardiovascular Network of Canada (CANet), Operations Centre
Role: Lead designer and developer, responsible for UX/UI, platform architecture, and full front-end build
Timeline: 10 weeks
Deliverables: Custom national project tracking platform, stakeholder dashboard, standardized reporting system

Project Tracker is a national project management platform built for the CANet Operations Centre, giving research teams across Canada a single, centralized system to log patient enrollment, financial commitments, and expenditures across every CANet-funded project.

The Problem

Before Project Tracker, monitoring CANet-funded research was slow and fragmented. Each of the 60+ CANet-funded research sites tracked patient enrollment and spending in its own spreadsheet, using its own format. Ahead of national project meetings, Operations Centre staff had to manually collect, reconcile, and consolidate updates from every site, a process that took roughly 2 weeks per reporting cycle. By the time the compiled report reached stakeholders, some figures were already a month or more out of date.

That caused problems on multiple fronts:

• For research teams, inconsistent reporting formats made it hard to compare progress against other sites, and there was no shared way to flag issues between meetings.
• For the CANet Operations Centre, staff spent an estimated 15 to 20 hours per reporting cycle manually compiling spreadsheets from dozens of sites, often working from figures that were already outdated by the time meetings happened.

The Approach

Rather than relying on generic project management software, I designed Project Tracker as a purpose-built platform tailored to CANet’s specific reporting needs, standardizing how every funded project tracks and shares progress.

Key decisions worth noting:

• Made the platform mandatory across all 60+ funded projects, replacing inconsistent spreadsheet-based reporting with one standardized system.
• Built a stakeholder dashboard so project status, enrollment, and spend could be reviewed live during national meetings, eliminating the manual pre-meeting compilation process.
• Connected metric tracking directly into CANet’s organization-wide reporting, removing a separate manual roll-up step that used to take days.

Key Features and Functionality

1. Project-Specific Tracking
   Granular, real-time tracking of patient enrollment, financial commitments, and expenditures for every funded project.
2. Intuitive Dashboard
   A comprehensive overview of project status and key metrics, built for quick access by stakeholders at every level.
3. National Project Meetings
   Used live during project meetings to provide proactive status updates and flag potential issues early.
4. Promotion of Research Involvement
   Visibility into ongoing research encourages participation and engagement at clinical practice sites nationwide.
5. Metric Tracking
   Feeds directly into CANet’s organization-wide metric tracking, supporting data-driven decisions and strategic planning.

Results

• Cut the national reporting cycle from roughly 2 weeks of manual compilation down to real-time, always-current data.
• Brought all 60+ CANet-funded sites onto one standardized reporting system, replacing individually formatted spreadsheets.
• Freed up an estimated 15 to 20 staff hours per reporting cycle previously spent manually reconciling site updates.
• Increased participating clinical practice sites from 60 to 75+ within the first 18 months, following improved visibility into ongoing research.
• What the client said:
  “Project Tracker gave us, for the first time, a real-time national picture of every funded project. It’s changed how we run our project meetings and how we report to our funders.”
  – Natalie S., Director, Partnership and Knowledge Mobilization, CANet Operations Centre