Creating a Launch Factory
A Conductor Case Study
Our customer, a top-20 global pharmaceutical company, needed to rethink the way they managed their multi-national, multi-million dollar product launches. They turned to Conductor™ to help them go to market and reach patients with their innovative therapy, faster.
Managing a complex launch
As the complexity of a project increases – involving larger teams, more complex delivery, or multiple geographies – teams tend to rely on the same roster of traditional approaches to manage that complexity. But often, these approaches do little to accelerate the success of the project.
- Endless meetings add delays.
- Complex spreadsheets and trackers only add to the complexity, with multiple versions to wade through, issues around access control, broken macros, etc.
- Creating regional or skills-based teams creates data silos, segregating or even losing information.
The future of product launches
Our customer, a top-20 global pharmaceutical company, found themselves in this position leading up to a multinational and multi-million dollar product launch. Leadership visibility into the progress and status of brand launch preparations was far from being optimal. Answering key questions like “How are the commercializations teams doing as we prepare to launch?” would require multiple phone calls, time-consuming reporting tools, and take a few days to bring the information together, analyze it, and finally get to the information needed.
Tailoring Conductor to our needs, development and roll out was fast, efficient, and painless. We will utilize Conductor to support all our future product launches – it has become the engine of our launch factory.
With multiple Excel-based status trackers for each of the firm’s 31 launch countries, version control was an inevitable challenge. Team leads were spending nearly as much time sorting through files looking for relevant information than they were moving the project forward.
Their spreadsheet-based tools were holding them back. Their technology didn’t match with their process or their working style. They reached out to Sensei Labs to implement Conductor.
By combing through the established launch process – the projects and tasks, owners and due dates – we were able to prioritize the data to display the most relevant, contextual information for each person, making their launch process easier to understand and more relevant.
With the existing process as our foundation, we then designed a new set of business rules to codifying best practices. Combining these business rules with Conductor’s existing toolkit, including access rights, and notifications, we enabled positive habit building and a productive dialogue.
In this way, best practices are documented, preserved, and propagated throughout the team, giving them the ability to easily scale as they grow. To get our customer up and running, our team met with the leadership and project teams on-site to provide face-to-face training. Open office hours were available for team members to drop-in for answers to any questions about the tool or for a more hands-on demo. Training videos with answers to the Frequently Asked Questions were posted to the learning app, Academy, for easy reference any time.
Critical to the tool’s success was having a strong champion and advocate. The firm’s Operations Lead, a person widely viewed internally as an early adopter of the latest and greatest tech, was exactly the champion the firm needed. With the perfect balance of a relentless optimist and a humble realist, he helped to spread excitement and created a shared feeling of trust. He connected with each country team throughout the roll-out, promoting adoption, a willingness to learn and ask questions, and a sense pride in the improvements they each had a hand in making possible.
Set up for success
Conductor helps me
ensure launch readiness
for my organization.
Curated data
With Conductor now live, team members can access, update, and review launch data all in a fraction of the time it took them when using their spreadsheet-based tools. As a cloud-based solution, data is stored in a single, shared, and secure destination accessible from all devices with a data or WiFi connection. With all their project data accessible right at their fingertips, collaboration and communication is easy and frequent.
Meticulous thought was put into Conductor’s design to ensure an experience that’s intuitive, logical, and familiar. Now, instead of complicated macros, tabs, and pivot tables, data is curated to match their preferences. The most relevant information is up front while deeper details are only a filter toggle away.
Course correcting faster
With this insight so readily available, leaders can understand at a glance which projects or teams need attention and identify where there are recurring concerns. Similarly, leaders can see which areas are excelling and can be called upon as a source for best practices to elevate the rest of the organization.
In addition to quantifiable data, Conductor also collects qualitative info – typically hard to come by – on how each team member feels the project is going. Openly sharing this ‘gut feel’ encourages team members to voice concerns earlier, allowing the team to identify possible problem areas and course-correct faster. The project teams posted over 1,500 reviews in the first month of Conductor being live.
Launching with confidence
With Conductor as the single source of all project information and files, teams now have the confidence and trust in the data needed to successfully launch their products again and again. By avoiding multiple file versions, endless presentations, and large group meetings to get up-to-date, the launch teams have saved a significant amount of time. In the highly regulated pharmaceutical world in which the firm operates, this time quickly translates to a faster time-to-market for life-saving, life-extending, and life-improving treatments for patients across the globe.
Book a Demo
We'll tailor a demo experience to your unique needs to show you how our digital workplace solutions can help your people love work!