Northeastern University graduate student Purvakshi Thakkar, who will graduate with a master’s degree in information systems from Northeastern’s Seattle campus in May, met with project managers to identify redundancies.
During her project management co-op at Siemens Healthineers in Seattle, Northeastern University graduate student Purvakshi Thakkar found project managers manually entering data across seven tools to track software updates.
For presentations, they had to re-enter all the data into PowerPoint.
“They would have to write all this data manually,” Thakkar said. “It was really too much manual work.”
Siemens Healthineers, which develops technology for health care providers, brought on Thakkar specifically to help teams streamline their project management processes.
Tracking software development and updates for advanced medical equipment required project managers to juggle multiple tools for scheduling, risk management and presentations — leading to redundancy and communication risks.
Thakkar, who will graduate with a master’s degree in information systems from Northeastern’s Seattle campus in May, started by meeting with project managers to see what was — and what wasn’t — working.
“I started having workshops to understand what are the pain points they are having,” she says. “Their information was everywhere and they had to add information manually because the tools were not connected at all.”
She used Smartsheet software and created customized project management tools along with real‑time status reports and interactive dashboards for ultrasound systems, catheters and transducers, automating 90% of manual work and streamlining workflows.
“I gave them a solution which basically automates everything,” she says, “so that they can focus on their work instead of spending time on the tool, which was wasting their time.”
After earning her undergraduate degree in information technology, Thakkar worked as a software engineer and project manager before enrolling at Northeastern to study information systems and project management. She started her six-month co-op at Siemens in June.
Project managers are responsible for ensuring that deliverables arrive on time. At Siemens Healthineers, these deliverables include software and hardware upgrades for ultrasound systems. Project managers are tasked with delivering these upgrades within a defined budget, scope and timeline.
“For the first time in my life, I saw 1,000 ultrasound units in front of me,” Thakkar says. “They were assembling the systems, and I was part of the research and development department.”
The project management tool Thakkar developed allowed project managers to focus on deliverables by automating reports and dashboards. This allows the program director to access project updates in a standardized format, streamlining executive reporting and improving project oversight.
Thakkar said the co-op experience helped her establish some career goals.
“I would like to explore any domain which can help me to reach a certain point where I can help others,” she says.
Working for Siemens also gave her a perspective on how teams work together when the projects stretch out over months and years.
Thakkar previously worked at Accenture, Quinbay Technologies and News Corp, where each upgrade typically took about three to four weeks to complete. At Siemens Healthineers, projects generally require between one and four years — because regulations vary between countries where the company sells its products.
“For each and every version of software, Siemens had different project managers,” she says. “It was interesting to understand how the system works and why it takes time.”