Simplifying collaboration with consistent visuals

Reckitt consolidated project reporting across departments with Office Timeline

A few years ago, Reckitt, the company behind some of the world’s best known and most trusted Health and Hygiene consumer brands, transitioned from having separate R&D Project Managers for each Healthcare  brand team to a centralized PPM department.

While the new department continued to work with individual teams on product innovation and the base business activities, this change improved collaboration among project managers and helped standardize workflows and reporting across the company.

Yet, adopting a single, unified approach to project management instead of dozens of brand-specific processes and reporting lines came with its challenges, as R&D Program Manager Matt Russell quickly found out.

One major challenge was selecting a project timeline visualization tool that could consolidate all the different presenting and reporting styles into one. Given that each project manager already had their own approach to managing resources, risks, timelines, and other processes, this was no small undertaking.

Need for a manager-friendly timeline maker

Stakeholder management across Reckitt is primarily done in PowerPoint, but without a standardized approach, project managers handled it in different ways.

Some manually created timelines using tables with colored cells for tasks, which took up to an hour or more. Updating a project built that way often required spending 20 minutes cross-referencing the Microsoft Project file with the PowerPoint slide.

Other managers manually created a timeline in PowerPoint but created moveable rectangles to overlay the grid. However, this approach was also time-consuming.

For those like Russell who preferred working in Microsoft Project, the alternative was inconvenient: taking a snapshot of the timeline built within the tool and copying it into PowerPoint. While this was faster to create, it wasn’t interactive, and the visual was often too complex for non-management audiences.

Overall, with so many different ways of creating timelines across the company, visual consistency was a constant challenge. “Consistency was also difficult because everyone had their own style and design customizations that they wanted to use,” says Russell.

Giving Office Timeline a go

As one the Program Managers of the R&D department, Matt Russell first looked into Office Timeline as a potential solution to automatically upload program data from Microsoft Project into PowerPoint slides. 

What won him over was the tool’s seamless integration with Microsoft Project, which allowed him to quickly update his slides whenever the timelines changed and saved him hours of manual work. Previously, he had used Power BI to connect Project data to PowerPoint, but creating visually appealing timelines through Power BI became too expensive. 

By the time the PPM was consolidated, every member of Russell’s team had their own Office Timeline license, which they brought with them into the department. He continued using the tool to build project timelines, once even rebuilding a hundred-line plan on the spot and turning what could have been a long, drawn-out meeting into a focused, productive session. 

“There was a long list of tasks to do, and it felt like the momentum dropped. So I dropped the project plan. I went straight to Office Timeline and built it from scratch in there, and it engaged the wider team. So the idea that it was built there and then, you could color it, you could move things around, and it was more interactive and more visual,” says Russell. 

After that, interest in Office Timeline grew within Reckitt through word of mouth. The decisive moment came in 2024, when the PPM split its activities into different workstreams: one for risks, one for actions, decisions, and minutes, and one for timelines. As one of the company’s SMEs on Microsoft Project, Russell seized the opportunity to formally pitch the tool within the timelines workstream. 

He made the case by showing how Office Timeline aligned with the department’s key goals: seamless integration with Microsoft Project for faster data transfer to PowerPoint and a consistent approach to project visuals that simplified stakeholder reporting. That ultimately gave the tool the green light.

“Long story short, we now have 65 Office Timeline licenses within PPM, and more people are getting interested every time I present to a different set of stakeholders on a different team,” he says.

Saving time while scaling project visual consistency

Due to his dynamic role as a Program Manager, Russell gets to work across multiple brands and products rather than the day-to-day projects. Fortunately, Office Timeline gives him the flexibility to adapt quickly to different sides of the business and build a project plan in minutes.

“You can open up a blank PowerPoint slide [...] and within 5 minutes you've got a project plan based on SME knowledge within the room that you can quickly move around and get an idea.”

In terms of efficiency gains, Russell puts the speed of refreshing timelines at the top of the benefits list, closely followed by the ease of building timelines using custom themes and ready-to-use templates.

“The rate of refresh was instant to my PowerPoint slide, as instant as clicking the button and letting it do its buffer, and so that was a big win for me. It was once you'd built your timeline on your slide, you just hit refresh, so you went from half an hour [...] per project to seconds.”

According to him, using Office Timeline reduced timeline creation from one hour to just ten minutes, and with all the templates in place, this could be reduced even further. More than that, updating project slides was reduced from 20 minutes to one minute - so, assuming there were weekly updates for 10 projects (in the worst-case scenario), each project manager would save approximately 3 hours per week. That’s almost half a day of work saved - every week.

Office Timeline gradually became more used within teams across Reckitt, to the point where timelines created with the tool were instantly recognizable to Russell.

“It looks sleek. Using Office Timeline is quickly changing the way things look, the colors, the styles. Even though we've got consistency of color palette, of where everything goes on the slide, and how we're going to use it, people do have the ability to quickly change it. It's adaptable while keeping everyone consistent, and that's what we needed it to be.”

He’s also excited about the Planned vs. Actual feature, calling it a “game changer”, as it aligns with the department’s KPIs and shows how early or late projects are relative to their delivery dates.

What else is in store for the future? Once fully embedded into the PPM department, the management team will look to see if the benefits of the software can be rolled out to other areas of the business as well.

Russell is optimistic, especially as managers from different departments are eager to get involved and keep reaching out to him. “People are going to get more and more comfortable with it. It’s one of those tools that takes a little getting used to at first, depending on your experience. But once people like it, they don’t stop using it, from my experience.”

About Reckitt

Based in the UK, Reckitt is a global leader in consumer health and hygiene with a portfolio of household-name brands including Lysol, Dettol, Finish, Nurofen, Gaviscon, Strepsils, and Veet. Guided by its mission to protect, heal, and nurture, Reckitt helps millions of people live cleaner, healthier lives every day.