Our client had been leading the world healthcare industry for over 50 years. But due to unexpected conjuncture, the world was changing—fast. Disruptive new entrants and pressing demand were redefining the average R&D velocity across the industry. 

The organization was at a strategic junction where it had to take bold action. Together, we started by redesign the IT function: hundreds of engineers, dozens of external providers, and months of delays were frustrating both business and IT. 

We started by a thorough diagnostic that revealed areas of strength and critical challenges in each function. Following with a series of client workshops to discuss findings and develop and action plan. We helped turn siloed IT and business teams into champions of a collaborative, agile way of working. In a very conservative industry with soaring digital disruption and a high-level of uncertainty, we helped build an agile digital Information Technology & Solutions department and a streamlined IT strategies delivery across all teams and worldwide locations. 

Business challenge 

The client, a 50 years old pharmaceutical company present in 100 countries, work at a high-level of excellence to improve people’s life in a high-stake industry where fault tolerance is zero, since a fault can lead to human death. The Information Technology & Solutions department has the mission to design, build and maintain all the information and communication technology landscape supporting the organisation’s business functions. 

With the increasing demand on their products and the faster pace imposed on their R&D teams to pursue new vaccines and medicines, the client needed to quickly scale-up its engineering capabilities while making sure that all the moving parts were working in the same direction and delivering value in line the company’s strategic objectives. 

Our solution to strategize and transform 

After a first diagnostic of the IT organisation, we had a clear vision of the client’s areas of strength and critical challenges in each IT function as well as the disconnects in the interfaces where the IT functions are receiving inputs and sending outputs. 

For this engagement, we needed a team of experts from Markup Camp and the client’s top managers to work in a series of workshops to build a clear transformation plan and follow up on a weekly basis on its implementation. In the meantime, our embedded engineering teams were transferring knowledge to all the previously siloed teams on how to build a modern development environment and disperse information cross-team and upstream to the business owners. 

In only 18 months the team: 

1. conducted a diagnostic that revealed stakeholders wanted the process to help deepen their business-engineering relationship, rather than just speed-up delivery 

1. ran workshops with IT, business, and advisor teams to generate design concepts and align leadership around a vision for the future organisation 

1. implemented a new modern development environment featuring a set of organizational and workflow patterns for implementing agile practices at an enterprise scale, standardised product and requirements portfolio management, and continuously code delivery using DevOps practices 

1. coached and mentored IT teams, advisors, and senior leadership on agile practices 

1. broke down barriers across all teams to integrate diverse perspectives into the IT product portfolio management 

This use case is proof that with a collaborative approach to change management, focus and discipline, even the largest corporations in the most conservative industries can build agility in their organisation. It pays off when an organization commits to transformation and pushes through the first resistance plateaus to build collaboration and alignment across-functions. This transformation journey has changed the way the whole organisation sees the Information Technology & Solutions department and helped the engineering teams understand and own the company’s vision.