“Hacking” Agile Project Management to Unlock Greater Patient Value

Vanco Vlastimil (��ֳ� S.A.) — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 10:08:00 +0000

Kamil Mroz, Patient Value Early Solutions

Vanco Vlastimi… Fri 03/06/2022 - 12:08

Sprints, Scrums, User stories, Kanbans, product backlogs… what’s all the hype about? Agile has recently stolen the spotlight and is the “talk of the town” in professional project management associations. However, it can sometimes be hard to pin-down in its practical application to the pharmaceutical sector and is often reduced to a buzzword implying the need to stay nimble in the face of uncertain conditions.

As such, we recently partnered with the Project Management Institute and several other pharmaceutical companies to try to “hack” Agile – and therefore better understand where and how to concretely apply Agile practices in drug development. The questions that were proposed to “hack” were:

How could Agile improve the day-to-day working within an interdisciplinary Medicines Development Team?
How could Agile be used for planning of Medicines Development from research to launch?
How can Agile optimize delivery in a highly regulated environment?
How can Agile help Medicines Development teams rapidly respond to changing business requirements?
How could Agile be gradually introduced in an established organization without impacting business continuity?

This virtual hackathon drew 52 participants from all around the world. Teams broke-out into working sessions where they brainstormed ideas, refined them into key practices – and later presented them to the broader audience where participants voted on the best practices. The top three best practices selected with the most potential impact were:

Experimenting with minimal viable products to enable life-cycle management (including crude formulation)
Focus on the Agile principle of “Simplicity: Maximizing the work not done”
Collaborating in smaller teams with better defined interactions between these teams to increase focus and accountability

Not only did the hackathon foster a cross-departmental collaboration between ��ֳ� employees from Development, Research, Rare Diseases Organization and Supply & Technical Solutions, it also brought together some major pharmaceutical companies such as BMS, GSK and Mirati Therapeutics.

Our industry is known for its weighty regulation, long development timelines, strict process and quality requirements – things that may appear at odds with Agile principles. However, our cross-company and cross-functional “hack” event showed that agile ways of working could help our industry push through any perceived barriers and help enhance innovation competitive advantage.

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Hackathon Brings Together Diverse Talents for Digital Innovation

eCMSadmin — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Hackathon Brings Together Diverse Talents for Digital Innovation

Stayce Murray, IT Digital Clinical Development

eCMSadmin Fri 19/03/2021 - 11:00

As part of our ongoing digital business transformation, we are evolving our clinical development operating model from a sequence of activities into an integrated digital technology and data-enabled process.

Each aspect from clinical study design, feasibility assessment, clinical site identification, patient recruitment, data collection, data analyses and reporting are included and open to future innovations. Several pieces are already undergoing major renovations through our End-to-End (E2E) Clinical Study Automation program; that aims to ensure quicker delivery of each study while simultaneously reducing costs and enhancing consistency and quality. This is being realized through an internally developed IT platform that will be used right from the clinical study design stage.

Digitalization is an enabler for us to collect and access data and information quickly allowing us to ask important questions, get the answers rapidly, so that we elevate and accelerate our contributions.

Empowered to bring this vision to reality and inspired by the momentum for more inclusive innovation, in February we called on the collective intelligence, curiosity and enthusiasm of our employees to participate in a hackathon. A sprint-like event where ��ֳ� programmers and experts from diverse backgrounds collaborated on a specific technical design challenge for the E2E Clinical Study Automation program.

The hackathon focused on improving the quality and efficiency of data analysis through automation. Seventeen multi-disciplinary teams with colleagues from 16 departments across ��ֳ� participated in the month-long event. In the end, holistic, innovative approaches to solve the problem statement were submitted by 70% of the teams; far exceeding internal expectations and external benchmarks. Participants shared their excitement and pride in seeing the diversity of teams, thoughts, and submissions for the hackathon.

Advancing our digital business transformation in a more end-to-end manner and utilizing our diverse talents in creative ways is a win-win for all: for functional transformations through synergies and knowledge sharing, for all employees through development and connectivity, for ��ֳ�’s sustainability and ultimately for the patients we serve together.

innovation

Hackathon End-to-End Clinical Study Automation E2E Clinical Study Automation clinical studies

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Hackathon

“Hacking” Agile Project Management to Unlock Greater Patient Value

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Hackathon Brings Together Diverse Talents for Digital Innovation

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