Agile as a key differentiation in Life Sciences

Roche’s benchmark

Imagine a big, tradicional company, working all across the globe, with thousands of collaborators, and with a big challenge: innovate in the way of they do business, innovate in how they deliver value to clients and consumers, in long term, innovate in the business model, trying to reach different scopes of the market and interacting with the ecosystem in a new way.

Now, the biggest challenge: Roche, as you already know, is one of the largest Life Science’s company, and brought the agile methods to a highly technical and regulated ecosystem.

McKinsey made an interview in 2019 with two leaders of Roche’s agile transformation, Frank Duff, senior VP, and Malte Schutz, VP.

I tried to brought in this article some key-points, and the full interview is on the link below.

Agile: The new active ingredient in pharma development (mckinsey.com)

Why Agile?

• There is a combination of external and internal factors.
• Internally, the complexity in process, systems and governance bring some challenges to people in company. This kind of challenge can impact the engagement from teams
• Externally, the challenges come from the digitization, use of data in complex scopes and the competition.
• Removing complexities and making some process “lean” can help the company focusing in the patient, staying closer and spending more time in their issues.

Agile for Biotech

• The mindset shifts that the company needed came from the culture change, focusing on agile
• The company needed new approaches in industry to accelerate the value-based delivers, connecting Roche’s solutions deeper into the patient journey
• Agile culture was introduced as a mindset and behavior changers before the tools and products framework, so the company was understand the meaning and useful of agile even before the use of scrum and kanban.
• Bring back the ownership was the key of success for the culture change. It impacts in how the employee sees and engage in his work. Ownership not only brings the company near the mission but also brings the collaborators closer to the clients, enhancing quality, efficiency and insights.

Agile Culture

• Agile in science is a challenge because life science industry needs to be close to perfection. The point of attention is about the design of clinical trials, process to achieve patient and stakeholders experience.
• The question made during the agile design implementation was What do I need here? This question helps the company to make better connections inside Roche, evolving the trial, for example, by taking different. advices from key people, or, in another words, you need to bring together more people to do a better job.
• The agile culture is not about how to make perfect products/services. It is about How do we understand better our client and have the expert mindset. The point is to have insights of the. different journeys that are connected to improve the business itself and create a purpose that matters.
• With the changes on the process of conducting a project, two huge points are brought back: creativity and independent thinking. This enhance the ownership and challenges the employee in a good way of making decisions and understanding his/her strengths and weakness.

Measuring outcomes

• The impact in early stages is more about the understatement of the patient journey, and also the staff engagement and the connection of the employees during the process, but the full picture of the change is up ahead yet.
• Another “win” is about the concept of Perfection. There is many factors that need to be perfect, but not all the factors. It means that the agile culture could help the company understands when and where to be perfect.
• There are 2 topics that were revolutionary until now: time and transparency. The time spent in meetings were up to 1 hour and with too much people. Now they have smaller groups making work meetings, what is impacting in innovation. Transparency also impacted. With more communication, efficient and qualified communication, transparency came as a mature new structure of the company.

Conclusion

• Maybe agile is not something that will transform your company, or the health ecosystem, but it is a first step into the change vision of communication and integration, first in companies, after in health sector.
• Agile can be one of the change makers or accelerators in health. The time will tell, but we need to start now.