When this pharma project manager hit a wall with Project, Milestone training kept him moving.
Wayne Yarnall had plenty of experience with Microsoft Project, but when he needed to learn some advanced techniques, Milestone’s training helped him deliver.
“Our training with Milestone pushed us in the right direction.”
Wayne Yarnall, Biotechnology Firm
In 2024, Wayne Yarnall, MPH, PMP, faced a challenge: He was asked to create the first fully integrated clinical-trial planning template at the biotechnology firm where he works, a company that develops and tests antibody therapeutics.
“We’d never had a company-specific trial planning tool,” says Wayne, a certified project manager who’s spent over 20 years managing clinical trials and other projects across the pharmaceutical industry. “Our trial managers had been using different planning solutions of their own, but we’d never had anything created specifically for our company.”
Wayne and his team wanted to implement a fully integrated planning tool, based in Microsoft Project, where anyone leading a clinical trial could plug in a governance approval date and get a cascaded timeline to help guide that trial through its life cycle.
Wayne was asked to make it happen—and he knew it would be more than just a simple undertaking.
“I’ve worked in Microsoft Project for a long time, but I only know what I know—and I probably don’t know a lot of things that it could do.”
The unique challenge of scheduling clinical trials
“The pharma world is kind of unique,” says Wayne. While other types of projects have a clear beginning and end—like construction projects, for example—clinical trials don’t always follow predictable patterns.
“It’s tough to put parameters around a clinical trial, because it doesn’t always go the way it’s planned,” says Wayne. Patients might drop out of a trial midway through. Regulatory agencies might require protocol changes. The data might reveal the need for dosage adjustments mid-trial. Any of a number of factors can reset entire timelines.
“From a project management perspective, it can really be a mess in the middle of a trial,” says Wayne. “All of those timelines that looked so great to start can kind of blow up and we have to pivot to an amendment and go back through some of those processes again.”
Despite the challenges, Wayne needed to create a Microsoft Project schedule template that could support all the nuances and unknowns of a clinical trial.
Help was on the way.
Around that time, Wayne’s organization brought in Milestone Consulting Group to provide two days of Microsoft Project training to about 30 project managers, including Wayne, at their facility in Princeton, New Jersey.
The timing was ideal.
Wayne arrived the first morning with a list of questions, and he began asking them as soon as he could. Dan Renier, Milestone’s training director and a renowned Microsoft Project expert, was more than ready to help Wayne—but first, he wanted to show the group a new way to think about Microsoft Project.
“YJTJ was an epiphany for me.”
The YJTJ Approach: a new way of thinking
At most trainings Dan Renier delivers—even for the most seasoned Microsoft Project pros—he begins with the foundational concept he and the Milestone team identified over 20 years ago. They named this concept”YJTJ”, which stands for Your Job/Tool’s Job. Virtually everyone who hears it finds it eye-opening.
“YJTJ was an epiphany for me,” says Wayne.
“It basically means, just do the things you need to do in Project, and then let the software do its work,” he says. “I had never heard that concept before.”
This mindset shift resonated with Wayne. “It’s like, get out of the way and let the tool do what it’s good at.”
A training style that works
Wayne mentions how impressed he was with Dan’s unique understanding of Microsoft Project, and his ability to train long-time project managers.
“It’s hard to come into an organization and pull off a training for a bunch of people who have already been using Project for a really long time,” says Wayne. “Dan Renier did it well—and had an impact. It just speaks to Dan’s professionalism and his style that he could do that. He breaks down barriers. And his training just hit.”
“It’s hard to come into an organization and pull off a Project training for a bunch of people who have already been using it for a really long time. Dan Renier did it well—and he had an impact.”
Measurable business impact
Milestone’s training and Dan Renier’s ongoing support have helped Wayne achieve something his company had been working toward for a while: the ability to benchmark their performance.
“We’re now getting to a place where we can measure ourselves against our historical trials, and also against the industry,” says Wayne. “That was the whole back-end goal of developing this template. We wanted to be able to take key milestones from within each trial and compare our performance to a year ago, two years ago.”
The leadership at Wayne’s organization also wants to see how they’re performing compared to other pharma companies.
“We’re relatively small,” says Wayne, “so we’re tasked with doing more with less. Having an efficient way of working helps us do that—and our training with Milestone pushed us in the right direction.”
Here’s one example of a challenge Milestone trained Wayne to solve:
Wayne’s Challenge:
“Our clinical trial planning team sometimes comes into trials that are already underway,” says Wayne, “where certain aspects of the trial—mainly in the startup phase—are already completed.”
Wayne needed to build a Microsoft Project schedule that could capture the high-level history of all the steps that had been completed, without disrupting future scheduling logic. In a standard project, entering the date after a step is completed will cascade down and affect all the future steps. Wayne asked Dan Renier from Milestone how to prevent that from happening.
Milestone’s Solution:
“Dan Renier suggested creating a new column within Microsoft Project—a ‘Historical Actuals’ column so we can use that column to capture high-level dates, but those dates won’t impact the rest of the project file,” says Wayne. “This was something that was beyond the scope of my knowledge going into the training with Dan.”
