The Problem

A leading pharmaceutical company is able to distribute their product based on two sets of factors: regulatory authorizations and manufacturing attributes.  Regulatory approvals can change as frequently as weekly and the business needs to be in a position to respond and retract lots or entire products based on these changes.

This tracking is currently a manual process, with lots of human interaction and involvement. The risks are significant. Capital funding had been secured, but the stakeholders were unsure how to proceed. Was this a problem that warranted a technological solution? Was it a business change effort? Or both? 

The Solution

This design workshop specifically brought all stakeholders together, discussed specific elements that needed to be addressed (e.g. three global regions, many data elements existed in manufacturing, distribution and Quality systems) and enabled them focus their brainstorming sessions in a safe environment that resulted in them suggesting a new business process and technology enablement project would be the best bet to solve this problem.

A half-day Project Design Workshop takes a series on inputs: business problem items, technology and process boundaries (e.g. systems impacted by new solution, interfaces required and personnel impacted by this change, etc) and produces a high-level network diagram arranged to show project activity dependencies and duration-based estimates for these activities, and produces a risk-adjusted project schedule.

The Result

This workshop reached consensus on how to proceed with a business process re-engineering and technology development project. It produced a level-3 decomposition schedule, which was agreed to by key project stakeholders. 

Running several simulations of this project’s plan resulted in project schedule that could be completed in as few as 48 weeks, or as many as 66 weeks. This variability is directly related to the stakeholder’s lack of awareness about this project’s specifics. But you can see that this data would at least provide an estimate of time and cost and enable appropriate decisions to be made – decisions based on thoughtful data.

This project deliverable that outlined the project’s scope, a high-level network diagram that showed each team’s activities and their relationships with the other team’s work effort and a list of deliverables and duration-based estimates on the time it would take to complete the work that was required for a successful project.