July 23, 2025 • 56 mins
In this episode, we introduce a new approach to operational excellence, one built for the realities of today’s biopharma landscape.
As the industry faces tighter budgets and widespread restructuring, the pressure to “do more with less” has never been higher. But when you can’t fix everything, where should you start?
We share how Sigma Lab Consulting helps clients focus on the workflows that matter most—those that, if broken, pose the greatest risk to execution, decision-making, or speed. Drawing on experience in R&D, clinical operations, and facilities management, they reveal how minor workflow gaps often compound into costly project delays.
They also explain why many organizations waste time chasing the loudest problems, rather than identifying the most impactful ones—and how their Workflow Criticality Assessment offers a focused, scalable way to prioritize improvements and build long-term resilience.
Whether you’re leading a transformation or trying to regain control of daily operations, this episode will give you a new way to think about where (and how) to begin.
Learn more about us by visiting: https://sigmalabconsulting.com/
Want our thoughts on a specific topic? Looking to sponsor this podcast to continue to generate content? Or maybe you have an idea and want to be on our show. Fill out our Interest Form and share your thoughts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of Lean by
Design podcast.
I'm your host, oscar Gonzalez,with my co-host here, lawrence
Wong, and we're taking a littlebit of a different approach.
Today we're gonna have aconversation about what we are
doing with Sigma Lab Consulting.
As you guys know, sigma LabConsulting is our consulting
firm that we've started and webrought on board the podcast so
(00:23):
that we can communicate some ofthese things that we are seeing
in the industry trends, changes,issues, challenges, things that
we're seeing across our domainsand how they relate to
operational efficiency and riskmitigation how do you mitigate
the risk of your operations tobeing a reason for having a
(00:44):
failing business?
So we're having a littleconversation here to talk about
things that we're recognizing inthis space and how we are
adjusting and repositioning ourapproach to what it means to
have operational excellence inbiopharma.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I think the general sense of operational excellence
seems to be this nice to have,but given the current state of
the economy, the state of ourindustry and life sciences,
there's a lot of I would sayrisks being very apparent in the
last couple of years.
Obviously, the one that sticksout is everybody hears about all
(01:24):
the layoffs, right, and soteams are shrinking, but the
workload is still there, andwhat we've seen with our clients
is people are really shiftinghow they spend their money, time
and resources.
So we've seen a lot ofcompanies really spend a lot of
money on making sure that theiroperations are still intact
despite some of these thingsthat are happening outside of
(01:45):
their control.
I think one of the things thatwe've tried to help our clients
do is really focus, and ourcurrent approach has been you
can find it on our website butthe three things that we really
focus on are being able todiagnose what our clients are
facing and then trying tosimplify whatever those business
processes are and then drivingadoption for that new way of
working.
When we think about where doyou begin diagnosing?
(02:08):
That's where everybody getsstuck is you have all of these
things that you have to worryabout, and we've been playing
with this idea of are youapproaching process improvement
in a way that is about makingsomething go faster, or are you
approaching it in a way thatyou're preventing something from
breaking?
And those are two differentapproaches.
Way that you're preventingsomething from breaking, and
those are two differentapproaches.
But what you end up asking isreally the same question at the
(02:30):
end is what's critical and whathappens if it doesn't work?
What happens to your business,what happens to your team, what
happens to the individuals thatare part of this workflow?
And there's a lot to considerwhen you are faced with these
challenges.
When things do break, we'resort of shifting our services so
that we help our clients reallynarrow down on what those
(02:52):
workflows are.
We've been a part of a lot ofcompanies that, unfortunately,
they do what leadership sayswhen they try to fix some
process and you wonder, okay,well, how did they come up with
that?
And there's not really anobjective way to quantify how
they came up with that decision,and what we're trying to do
here is help them come up with abetter decision on what to
(03:14):
focus on.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Let's take the listener in a little bit from
the beginning.
What are we used to seeing?
When people approach us aboutworking on a project or
developing a solution, Somebodycomes in.
What is it that they're comingto you with?
What is the information thatthey give you?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Usually comes in a couple of forms.
The most common one is I wantyou to do X.
And then the next question weask is why do you need that?
Because a lot of times, there'sa lot of assumptions around the
solution, even though there'snot.
Because a lot of times, there'sa lot of assumptions around the
solution, even though there'snot a really concrete
explanation of what the actualproblem is.
Oftentimes, what they're sayingthe solution is is just fixing
(03:54):
a symptom and not reallyfocusing on the actual problem.
So a really good example is wehave a lot of clients that use
some of these work managementplatforms like Smartsheet, and
they'll say hey, I need adashboard for X, I just want to
click a button and I want to seethis.
And you're like why do you needthat?
What problem are you solving?
They step back and they havethis confused, look on their
(04:15):
face and they're like oh well,we have all this information, we
just want to connect it.
And then, okay, well, whatdecision are you making when you
connect it all?
And then now you start to peelthe onion and start to figure
out okay, well, it sounds likeyou're trying to make a decision
on whether or not to approvethis thing, and I don't think
having a dashboard with all thisinformation is actually going
to help you, because you'reoverloaded with all this
information that you don't needto make that decision.
(04:36):
I think that's probably themost common thing that we see is
people come to us with thissolution that they have in their
mind without actually doing theeffort of diagnosing.
Is this problem even worthsolving?
Is this even a problem, and howimportant is this problem?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
You're also bringing in another side of it that
you've talked about in one ofyour LinkedIn posts, is the
difference between a consultantand a contractor.
You know a contractor, youmight expect I'm going in, I'm
doing whatever the client needs,but when you approach a
consultant, the idea is thatthey are going to make you think
differently about thechallenges or the issues that
(05:11):
you're approaching them about.
We have spent a majority of ourcareers being mindful about
what we were looking into orjust the fact that we were
interested in how do we makethings better.
We've gone into certificationswith Lean, six Sigma, with Scrum
, with understanding systems,theories and change management.
And when you talk aboutorganizational behavior and
(05:34):
maturity, where they are intheir systems and processes like
this is really where we havejust consumed all of that to
understand at a deeper levelwhat are these challenges doing?
What are these issues doing?
That seem to be a nice to have.
So, to your point, ourexperience is that when folks
are coming to us, they'vediagnosed themselves.
(05:56):
Well, we already did a look.
Okay.
Well, where do you want tostart?
We're going to start with this.
So you're going to start with aprocess at this juncture that
occurs once every quarter andthat is your highest priority
right now.
When you start to lay thingsout in that way, it has low
touch points.
It might have high value.
So maybe there is some sort ofprioritization, but any work you
(06:18):
do on that does not affect theday-to-day whatsoever.
So how about focusing on thethings that are slowing down
your teams daily?
Because those things willcontinue to compound, continue
to compound into people'svacations where they're on their
computers working, because ofhow slow things move, how stuck
things get.
When we originally positionedourselves, we had this notion
(06:39):
that everybody wanted to beoperationally excellent.
Everybody wanted to get all thecrap out of the way, that
everybody wanted to beoperationally excellent.
Everybody wanted to get all thecrap out of the way.
They wanted to have things morestreamlined.
Because you hear about iteverywhere.
You see it in personal goals,project goals, corporate goals,
where they want folks to becomeinnovative, to strive for
(07:00):
operational excellence.
But there's no real universaldefinition in any of these
companies of like.
What are we expecting?
What does that mean?
And so what do we do?
We attach ourselves to thething that burns us the most,
not the people around us, thething that we find most annoying
, or because my project is atthis phase and this is my thorn.
(07:23):
This is the biggest priority,but that's not always the case,
because your effort and thevalue of return might not match
up.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
It reminds me of that analogy when somebody comes up
to a doctor and says, hey, Ineed open heart surgery, and
it's like I think you just needa Tylenol.
You know, people reallyexaggerate the pain and I get it
.
It's so close to you, right?
You're like staring at a tree,but you're missing the forest.
But you really have to stepback to understand.
Okay, if I commit to doing thisthing, is it actually going to
help my team day to day, or isit just something that's really
(07:52):
annoying me, like a little flythat's in your apartment or
house?
That stuff can be reallyannoying, but in the grand
scheme of things, is it reallythat important?
Or should I be focusing on theroof that's about to collapse?
And I think the overall messagehere is that you can't fix
everything.
You have to decide how you'regoing to spend your time, your
money and your resources.
So we find that that's not avery easy thing to do.
(08:16):
There's a lot of politicalforces that are pushing you
towards something I thinkthere's not enough objective
analysis on.
Okay, this is the mostimportant thing for the company,
not just for my team.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
This is the thing that we need to look at.
That is exactly where everybodylooks.
No one dares question, or atleast there's not enough people
that question, and those are theother things we should be able
to.
You know, if you want to opendoor policy, I should be able to
ask why do you think that thatis the most important?
Did leadership have a powwowand talk to their teams?
(08:52):
Or did they have a powwow andsay this is what we see, but
what you see is not always whatis real?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Let's dig a little bit into what happens when
decisions like that are made fora improvement that doesn't
actually yield the results thateverybody is expecting.
I think you'll hear a lot ofpeople complain why are we even
doing this in the first place?
This doesn't change anything.
I feel like this is worse thanit was before.
There's all this noise at theend of it, but nobody makes
(09:19):
noise at the beginning, andthat's really where you need.
You need people to speak upabout these issues, and one of
the reasons why people don'tspeak up early is because
there's a level of trust rightwith your leadership to say, hey
, I think that they're going tomake a good decision on behalf
of us and the rest of the team.
You might have people that aremaybe more cynical and say, oh,
(09:40):
this isn't going to work out,and the whole point of that
beginning exercise is really tosurface those concerns so that
we know that when we go in thatdirection, we're all rowing in
the same way, because otherwiseyou're just going to be spinning
in circles.
So as we were preparing forthis episode, we talked about
what are those things that we'regoing to help tackle as leaders
(10:01):
face some of these issues.
So things like informationbottlenecks that delay critical
decisions that you're making.
Maybe there are handoffs thatare broken between teams.
Maybe you're doing a projectand you can't really see the
progress on real time.
Maybe there are some workflowsthat involve multiple
(10:21):
departments and information isjust getting lost.
How does that translate intolife sciences?
I can speak to the facilitiesmanagement side and you can
probably talk to the R&D, andthis is not just within our
areas of expertise, but ithappens everywhere.
And so in facilities managementwhat happens is every month
(10:42):
you'll get a set of work ordersthat come out.
Facilities management whathappens is every month you'll
get a set of work orders thatcome out and the technician is
supposed to take the work orderand schedule the time to do the
work on the piece of equipment,and so there's a lot of
coordination between theindividual doing the work, the
(11:03):
team that owns the equipment,the people that are preparing
the parts that you might needfor the work, and then there's
the whole documentation partthat are preparing the parts
that you might need for the work, and then there's the whole
documentation part.
There's the actually doing thework, closing out the work order
and then returning theequipment back to the owner, and
so when you have gaps in thatworkflow, there's a lot of
frustration that comes out ofthat.
You'll have people complainingabout why is my equipment not
returned to me?
I don't have what I need to dothe job, this is unsafe.
(11:26):
There's all of these things thatsnowball over time and you
imagine that's one work order.
Imagine just doing hundreds orthousands of work orders a month
.
How much wasted effort is beingspent on some of these broken
workflows?
And that's kind of thechallenge that we want to tackle
in our industry.
And I'm sure you can speak toR&D as well when you talk about
(11:49):
scientists being able tocoordinate their own work
between different functions andbeing able to provide updates on
their programs.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's wild because spaces within R&D, even in
clinical organizations now I'mgoing to separate the two,
because in a lot of spaces R&Das an organization develops and
they decide to onboard or takeon clinical operations, usually
the R&D space will start to sortof fade out because the
(12:15):
resource consumption that occursin clinical operations is so
high that it's very difficult tolift up charted path for
clinical operations while stillproviding resources into R&D,
where there's going to be a lotof rework because you're doing
hypotheses, you're exploringareas of science that are gray
(12:36):
or fuzzy at best, so there'sgoing to be constant iteration
and whatnot.
If we just talk about an R&Dorganization and let's consider
how complex some of theseprojects are.
So when we are transitioningfrom an academic institution,
you are essentially working as aparty of one.
(12:57):
You are an individualcontributor, you have your own
project, you manage your ownbudget, however good or bad, and
eventually you write a paper oryou do your dissertation or
it's part of your postdoctoraltraining.
But when you go into anorganization now your experiment
, your progress, your planningis everybody's.
(13:19):
It is your teammates, it is theproject teams.
These research teams are notfour people in a lab, they are
30, 40, 50 people with allvarying levels of very specific
expertise an mRNA expert,virology expert, an expert on
pancreatic cancer, animalhusbandry, bench work, bacteria
(13:42):
work you start to really balloonthe size of your project teams,
because now what's alsohappening is that the
requirements for you to provewhat's happening are even more
strict.
So now you have to conduct allof these other additional assays
, either in house or through aCRO, to prove what you are
saying to be, without a doubt,at least close to.
(14:04):
Without a doubt.
This is the mechanism that ournew compound does uses.
This is the distribution.
This is data on the ADMEabsorption distribution,
metabolism, excretion.
Here's a toxicology report.
Here's more information on thechemistry.
You're not talking about justone scientist that says, okay,
I'm going to grow some cells,I'm going to treat it with a
(14:26):
couple things at varyingdilutions and see what the
result is.
These experiments, thesehypotheses, are pretty large to
manage, and so what ends uphappening is you're going to
have your electronic labnotebook, probably a limb system
, but really what's missing fromthese spaces is that there's an
inability to project out, toplan, there's an inability to
(14:49):
forecast what you're going to bedoing over time.
Now, why is that a big deal.
Well, everybody is going tohave to forecast their budget.
They're going to have toforecast the activities that
they plan to do in the followingyear.
They're going to have toforecast goals to achieve.
And this is months before youeven hit the beginning of the
(15:09):
year.
This is like in the middle ofthe previous year.
I think a lot of companies aregoing to be starting in the next
two to three months doingbudgeting goals, et cetera.
I'm sure they probably justsolidified those goals.
There's this constant wheel ofchurning related to the
operations and when you start tolook at all of these different
pieces now, you're starting totalk about different tools,
(15:30):
different frameworks, differentways to discuss the work.
You know this one calls it atask, but because it's this
group and they're using JIRA,they call it an epic or a story
or what have you.
So as you're doing thesehandoffs, it is requiring
translation at every step.
(15:52):
Anytime you go in and out of asoftware, there's probably going
to be some level of translationwithin that handoff when you go
from one function to another.
That's another set of handoffhurdles that you have to get
through, especially when there'sa lack of consistency in how
you're managing or how you'remaintaining the data.
So what you end up seeing isproject managers that are trying
(16:16):
to get forecasts because theyhave to give information to
finance on where the budgetshould be stretching out, to
where they expect big chunks ofmoney to be taking in.
But you can't really get thereliability from R&D because
they can only see three monthsout and you're not going to get
(16:37):
a quote for work that you wouldplan to do at the end of the
following year from a vendor.
You have to kind of guess.
I guess from AI you can type insomething and say how much
would this cost me and maybe geta better number than just a gut
instinct.
But what ends up happening hereis that there's so many moving
pieces, there's so many people.
(16:57):
Everyone is essentiallydeciding how they want to manage
their work, especially whenyou're pulling in seasoned
veterans they have been workinghere 10, 20, 30 years and to
have them come in and now you'regoing to tell them there's a
way for you to do things herethat can sometimes jar people,
(17:17):
that can sometimes slow themdown because their desire to not
change the way that they dotheir work.
There's just increasing layersof complexity, and we're not
even talking about bringing inpartnerships because, as you
mentioned before the industry.
Right now we're holding cash.
People are not trying to dothings in-house when they're
already built elsewhere.
So what are they doing?
Acquiring?
(17:38):
They're acquiring and puttingmoney toward assets that are
already deep into the pipeline,deep into clinical operations,
in order to try to leveragetheir assets.
There are a number of patenteddrugs that are falling off the
cliff 2026, 2028, 2030.
A handful of staples that areout there and available.
(18:00):
Now they're going to slowlystart becoming generics, and so
now these companies are rushingto get something novel that's
out there, to give them another20-year patent cliff.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
To your point.
I think you're right about alot of companies, especially the
larger ones, focusing on thingsthat are later in the pipeline,
but the problem is still there,where you have these workflows
and handoffs that still have tohappen, right, it's actually
even more risk at that endbecause your product is much
more developed than it is at theearly stage.
Obviously, there's more volumeon the other end, but you're
(18:33):
much more focused on the laterstage, but there's still a lot
of complexity around how thesehandoffs happen.
Your point before you knowthere's there's just any time
that you have a lot of peopletrying to do something to make a
product get approved.
It just opens a room up for alot of mistakes to happen.
That's just the business thatwe're in, and so what I find is
(18:56):
that I think the really goodteam members will worry about
the people that are before themand after them and try to make
sure that whoever I'm gettingthis information from or whoever
I'm going to give it to, thatthey understand where I am.
Those are the best individualcontributors.
But that's not the full picturein a previous episode before
(19:22):
you have to look at the wholechain of events that happen and
how that information flows, sothat, as a process owner, you
know, actually, okay, the thirdstep in this process really
sucks and we're seeing a lot ofinformation being stuck here.
We need that to go faster,because it's really slowing
everything down.
And those are the best processowners, right?
I think what you'll find isthat the majority of process
owners go oh I have this metricthat I have to hit and I'm not
(19:43):
hitting it.
Guys, let's just throw thekitchen sink at this and try to
fix everything that we can, andwhat ends up happening is that
you don't actually solveanything and nothing improves
From the standpoint of twoproblems.
How do I know what to focus on?
And then the other one is ifI'm going to focus on this thing
, how much am I committing to it?
(20:03):
I think is really a bigquestion for people that are
really looking at theseimprovements.
Let's bring the conversationback to what we're proposing for
our clients workshop, wherewe're helping our clients
evaluate the criticality oftheir workflows.
I've shared with you before,but it's a really common thing
(20:30):
that we do in the realm ofreliability and maintenance, and
so how that takes shape is youhave a fleet of equipment that
you own in your facility, andthe idea is we don't have enough
people to service everything,we don't have enough money to be
able to invest in all thesedifferent sensors, so how do I
know what to focus on?
The idea is, if this thingstops working, how does it
impact the throughput of thefacility or the operation?
(20:50):
And then what's the overallreliability of this equipment?
Because if it's somethingthat's really important and it
runs really well, well I don'thave to worry about it.
But if something is reallyimportant and it doesn't run
really well, okay, now we needto focus the effort on fixing
that.
If you take that concept andapply it to all the different
workflows that are involved inthe different areas of life
(21:11):
sciences, you can really focusin on okay, the most critical
workflows.
And these are the reasons whyNow you can communicate that to
your teams, you can communicatethat to your consultants, your
contractors.
We all have the same directionthat we understand.
This is important.
It doesn't help when you justsend something down the pipeline
and people are like, where didyou come up with this and we
(21:36):
don't even understand the intentbehind it.
This is our attempt to help thelife sciences community really
hone in on the things that arereally important, because you
cannot fix everything.
That's just the reality.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
And there's so much.
And, as you alluded to before,as soon as you start peeling
that onion, you realize howrotten it is in the middle.
And not that any of theseorganizations are rotten, but
let's talk about how theorganizations scale.
Either they're developing anasset or they have an asset, and
they've taken in a huge slew ofmoney into a series A, series B
, whatever.
So now they're in this masshiring and now we have to
(22:10):
achieve milestones that we havealready projected out to our
shareholders, to our VCs.
So they're more driven on theprogress.
How far out can we get?
They're more driven on theprogress.
How far out can we get?
Now, the challenge is you needto be able to do that but also
cultivate some infrastructure ata steady state.
(22:31):
So what ends up happeningtypically?
Well, now that we're growing,oh, we need a new department.
Bam, here's a new departmentwith somebody that's managing
that.
They decide what tools areusing, how they're using it,
what they're going to do.
Bam, we need a qualitydepartment.
Here's another group, bam, weneed another CMC group to start
doing these things.
And you're without having theconversation.
(22:52):
You're building infrastructurethat is disjointed.
We initially started with adiagnosis, but our diagnosis was
more on the lines of where doesit hurt, not what is posing the
biggest risk to you, to thiscompany.
People that are in theorganizations now should start
(23:16):
to have this semblance of whatit means to have an
entrepreneurial mindset.
You have to recognize that, yes, we are trying to do
life-saving medications,therapeutics and mechanisms of
action that we're trying toattack, to circumvent this
disease.
But at the end of the day, youare functioning at a company, in
a business, and so you need tostart thinking about
(23:38):
operationally where are we mostvulnerable that things will just
stop?
Where are we most vulnerablethat things will just stop?
Where are we most vulnerable?
Where we would go down a rabbithole and then realize we should
not have gone in that direction.
You know, we spent a yeartrying to do inhaled and then we
realized that there wasmultiple papers that talked
(23:58):
about why people don't doinhaled medications for that
particular indication.
It's things like this, like howdo we avoid some of these
long-term disaster decisions,and part of that, I think, was
we took a look and said you knowwhat?
We have to take the reins andhelp them recognize all of the
different workflows.
(24:18):
You work very heavily withmanufacturing facilities.
I work very heavily with R&D,clinical operations, essentially
pre-commercial.
You know where you see tanks,gaskets and sensors.
I see the people, theirworkflow tools, their
notifications, stakeholder pool.
But when you put it on paperand you draw process maps and
(24:42):
flow maps, you wouldn't tell thedifference because they are a
system.
They are both systems that areparts of a whole, that are part
of an organization.
When you start to build processimprovement or start to improve
things that feel sluggishwithout having a North Star,
you're just going to have a lotof projects that will alleviate
(25:02):
something.
But is that the right thingthat you should be doing or the
right thing that you should beconcerned about right now?
Is this process that is once aquarter more valuable than this
issue that is happening three orfour times a week and slows
down the progress of a project.
For example, vendor management.
(25:22):
There's somebody that finds thevendor.
They talk to legal financeproject manager, make sure that
it's in the budget, they get itgoing, put in an SOW, get a PO.
Then there's this feedback loopof how much money has been
consumed, how much longer do wehave on the contract, are we
over budget and who is the ownerin that?
(25:43):
It's been my experience thatpeople in different departments
will point at each other and say, no, that's what you do.
No, that's what you do.
This is already a lack ofclarity.
But if you're seeing thatfriction and you're recognizing
that this is something thathappens almost all the time, it
slows down our projects by weeks, because there are many
(26:03):
different facets of science thatrequire a lead time.
To work with a CRO especiallywhen you get further down the
line and you're dealing withanimal work that require a long
lead time, you probably have awhole team of scientists working
on it.
For you to get 500 microgramsat a 37% purity, well, you're
(26:26):
going to have to cook up a lotof that stuff if you want to be
able to put it into an animal.
So that has a lead time.
So how are we identifying wherethe things could break, where
their impact is?
I think in a lot of places theprocess owner sort of lends
itself to like a departmentWithin the department.
(26:49):
They're like I don't know who'sthe one that manages that.
I know we manage it, but Idon't know who specifically.
That's very common and whatwe're doing here is we're saying
, look, before we start todiagnose, first we need to
prioritize what is really atrisk here, what is really going
to drive operational excellenceand decrease your operational
(27:11):
risk to where?
To your point, if this slowsdown, if this stops and it halts
progress for a month, that'sgoing to be somewhere you want
to take a look.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Another thing to point out is for people that
maybe have gone through thisexercise internally within their
companies.
These things change, right, asyour business goals, objectives
of your department or whateverchange.
You have to be evaluating thedifferent workflows that are
impacting your team and you haveto go through this exercise of
(27:42):
saying, okay, at this point intime, we've evaluated it and
these are the factors that welook at.
It might be something like howoften do we use this process?
How many times does this thingactually break down?
How long does it take for us tofix it?
How many other processes areaffected by this one workflow?
Because as you scale and grow,it just changes, right.
That's the only thing that'sconstant in this industry.
(28:05):
So you have to be very mindfulof doing this internal work to
evaluate which workflows are atrisk, and it's not something
that stays static, I would say.
For companies or people thatreally struggle with coming up
with a framework, this is wherewe come in and offer one
approach.
We're not saying that this isthe only way, but from our
experience in working in thisindustry and different teams
(28:26):
across areas of the business, wefind that the most effective
way to really think about thisis like what you said what's
most at risk and what happens ifit breaks.
Somebody might ask well, let'ssay I have this business problem
.
How do you think about theevaluation?
And so for us there's a set ofinputs and there's some
(28:47):
processing that happens using acouple of workflows and then you
get some output.
You really have to look atthose relationships between the
inputs and the outputs.
And what is that workflow thatis transforming that piece of
data or that handoff at the end?
And then you have to look atthe whole list and you have to
have some objective criteriawhere you're ranking everything
(29:07):
and then at the end of the day,you'll have a list of depending
on how complex your organizationis or how big the problem is.
You might have hundreds ofworkflows, but the point is to
narrow that list to 20%.
That caused 80% of yourproblems.
Right, the 80-20 rule here.
And when you fix that 20%that's causing 80% of your
(29:28):
problems, there's a ton ofbenefits.
That happens outside of justproductivity gains.
There's a cultural aspect thatwe've talked about so many
different times on theseepisodes.
That's really the push thatwe're making here is it's not
only fixing the things that aremost critical, but there are
other intangible benefits thatyou will feel from tackling
(29:48):
these challenges.
And just to give our audiencehow we're thinking about the
workshop it's not thismulti-month thing where it takes
a year to figure out what yourproblems are.
We're really coming in here andtaking a snapshot of what's
going on.
Our intention is to completethe in-person workshop or maybe
it's virtual within a week, butthere's a lot of pre-work and
(30:10):
post-work that happens.
We interview stakeholders toget a better understanding of
what you're dealing with.
It takes us time to come upwith recommendations based on
our own experience and some ofthe digital tools that you're
working with.
We're planning to have thisdone completely within one month
, and so within a matter of fourweeks, you've narrowed down
those workflows to give you moredirection on what you should
(30:32):
commit to for these improvementefforts.
Whether it's reducing risk,whether it's improving your
operations, you have directionon where to go, because you've
quantified that these are themost critical, and that's the
direction that we want theindustry to go in.
Whether or not you choose us tohelp you fix it, or choose
another consultant or anothercontractor, at least we all have
(30:54):
the same thing to work off oftowards improving whatever it is
that you have in your business.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
And I love this approach that we're taking now,
where you know we're going tosit with folks, we're going to
get more perspective.
You're not trying to boil theocean with interviewing
everybody in the company,because what we expect is that
there's going to be a little bitof friction.
We've seen that with a group ofstakeholders from different
functions that you're coming inand you're saying, okay, here's
(31:20):
the process as we know it.
Right away you get well, that'snot right.
Well, what's not right?
That's exactly what we want tocome in to do.
We want to make sure that we'rehaving those conversations.
That to your point.
Why are we doing this?
Oh boy, this isn't even howit's done.
You need to address that in thefront of the equation.
What this really does is itcreates a North Star for those
(31:41):
key stakeholders to say look,we've identified all these
different workflows thateveryone is having issues with,
but we have narrowed them downto these four focus areas.
These focus areas are thesubject of a deep dive diagnosis
who is involved?
What information do you have?
Where are the gaps?
How are you connecting yourworkflows with other functions
(32:05):
and their data?
Because the reality is, youcannot take a single data point
or a set of data points from onespace and assume that that's
giving you all the insights thatyou need.
You lack context.
In order for leaders to makedata-driven decisions, you have
to have enough context of all ofthe stakeholders and the
(32:26):
different areas that are alsorelated to that data point.
You can have the best datapoint in science.
Looking at the data by itself.
You're going to go this is ahome run, this is going to make
us a billion dollars.
And then you realize no one canmanufacture it.
We need a field of this type offungus or whatever in order to
(32:46):
cultivate enough.
So, oh, now let's do synthesis.
Okay, well, now you have a 45to 50 step synthesis of that
chemical.
Is that the journey that youwant to take right now?
That's going to be a lot ofresources, a lot of time to
hopefully produce something atthe end.
(33:08):
This is where you now have tostart taking the tasks that
you're doing and you need tostep back and start taking a
more strategic lens.
And you have to speak up onthose things, because the
reality is the people at the top.
They don't know the ins andouts of the things that are
happening and why, becausethey're not the ones that get
those questions or have to makethose decisions.
They're making more top-leveldecisions.
(33:29):
So it's important for folks tomake sure that they're surfacing
these things because as theseprojects continue to progress,
they will get more complex.
They will need additionalresources to capture data that
can convince the FDA that thisis a valuable asset that can go
into the clinic.
But you can only get there whenyour groups are talking together
(33:51):
, when your systems areconnected, when your alignment
in solving these challenges issound.
But if you just say everybody,go out and do process
improvement.
But if you just say everybody,go out and do process
improvement, you are going toget widely different opinions of
what operational excellence is.
Somebody might say, yeah, Iconverted my Word document to a
(34:11):
template for a PDF.
Amazing, also doesn't really domuch.
It helps this one person, butit does nothing to anybody
else's workflow.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Right, I want to step back and use an analogy that
people will be able to grasponto a little bit more and we
were talking about this offline.
What happens to baseball teamsin the offseason when they say
we need to get better?
That's not going to work rightBecause you have to look at a
(34:50):
ton of different things outsideof strength and conditioning.
You have to look at positionalplayers, the roster, the
salaries, the personnel aroundcoaching there's all these
different aspects of the teamand to just have a blanket
statement and say, hey, we'regoing to get better, okay, well,
where are we intending to focusin the offseason?
That's a huge question thatthese teams have to answer, and
I'm sure you're a huge baseballfan so you can probably go in on
(35:11):
each one of these aspects.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
You know hitting is different than base running, is
different than defense, isdifferent than pitching, is
different than conditioningyourself.
You have your trust within theteam but early on the back of
house in a baseball organization, the chief of baseball
operations the front office, thegm, all of these, these guys.
(35:35):
They're coming together andthey're saying where are we
lacking?
Well, we're recognizing we havea lot of talent in our bullpen.
So it's not a talent.
Maybe we need to change thecoach because we need somebody
to connect to them differently.
Or we're having some defensiveissues.
Well, this guy is also reallygood at that position.
Let's swap out these two andwe'll teach this other one to
(35:58):
play a position that has lowerrisk, because the amount of
balls that get hit in thatdirection are 40% less than if
he's on the other side of thefield.
These are things that now, withthe introduction of supermetrics
that was made famous throughMoneyball, the Brad Pittman and
Jonah Hill movie they'reactually taking data to
(36:21):
understand, to elevate theirinsights and have a strategy.
That's not just we need a heavyhitter.
Well, you need to get people onbase, because otherwise that
guy is just doing solo home runs, and when you got somebody
that's hitting home runs, youdon't want them to waste it on a
solo home run.
You want them to hit it withpeople on base.
So what do you do?
(36:41):
You organize your lineup forthe people that have the highest
possibility of getting on baseand sometimes you might see,
well, why is this guy hittingseventh?
But if you look at a team, youmight see a fast guy, a guy that
bunts really well or they canhit the gaps a power guy, and if
this power guy misses, we gotanother power guy behind him,
(37:02):
and then we have another guythat's also very consistent and
he's very quick, and then wehave another guy that's a power
hitter.
So at some point you are tryingto not necessarily stack all of
your power hitters in the samespace or the fast guys all in
one area, because you want to beable to have more opportunities
as you go through that lineupof putting people on base and
(37:25):
getting them to score.
So, in the same line of thought, like these are your tools.
Your tools are going to be yourequipment, people, technologies
.
We're seeing now people comingback from hitting a home run or
grounding out.
What are they doing in thedugout?
They're sitting with a tabletand looking at how did I swing.
They are reflecting on whathappened.
(37:46):
This is what separates goodbaseball players from great
baseball players.
They are reflecting on whathappened, something that we
don't do enough of, and I thinkthat as we go through this
workflow criticality assessment.
It is going to force theorganization, the leaders, the
stakeholders that come to thetable to really reflect and say,
(38:08):
okay, it really drives me nuts,but it's not that big of an
issue.
This is not something that isgoing to drown us that thing
over there that shows up everyweek and we sweep it under the
rug by creating this processthat involves extracting,
(38:30):
transposing the data, depositingit into somewhere else, sending
an email, getting a responseback, re-extracting it to make a
change, uploading it again.
These are processes that peopleare still doing.
Today.
You just spent six hours ofyour day on and off, jumping
back and forth for somethingthat could have been a lot less
(38:52):
painful.
It is interrupting your work,so you now don't have a workflow
.
Maybe you didn't even get achance to because you sent it
and then you ran to the lab towork on your experiment for
three hours.
So now, instead of somethingbeing done, sealed and delivered
on a Thursday, this processdoesn't even complete until
Monday or Tuesday of thefollowing week and we think,
(39:14):
well, that's just a couple ofdays and it's the weekend.
Try having that happen five, six, seven, eight times per person
over the course of a year.
That is a lot of time that isjust wasted.
I hear all the time.
I wish I had time to think.
Let me tell you right now whenyou look at a job description,
you are telling them this is howI think, this is my
(39:36):
capabilities and this is what Iknow.
That is what they're paying youfor.
They're not paying you becauseyou know how to pipette in and
out of a glass jar or anEppendorf tube.
That's not why they're payingyou the big bucks.
They're paying you to take thetime, slow down and reflect, and
that's what this does.
This puts our clients in aposition to reflect and say out
(40:00):
loud where the challenges arehow bad it can affect if it
breaks down and how hard it'sgoing to be to lift it back up.
How hard it's going to be ifthis person leaves.
Who is the only source ofknowledge on?
Speaker 2 (40:16):
this critical task.
You're really speaking to oneof the characteristics that
would make this workshop, andeven our efforts, successful,
and that's recognition of howcritical these workflows are.
Some of the other of howcritical these workflows are.
Some of the other things thatcome to mind are do you even
know what the pain points are ofyour workflow?
Because if you don't, then thatwouldn't help either.
I think another one to rememberis that there needs to be a
(40:38):
level of humility that comesfrom leadership to know that we
don't have all the answers andwe're seeking help.
Because if you approach this ina way where we know all the
answers and we just need to do X, well, that's really
closed-minded and what you'relooking for is not, like you
said in the beginning of theepisode about the difference
between a contractor andconsultant.
You're looking for a contractor.
(40:59):
You're just looking for someoneto execute, whether or not
that's right or wrong.
If that's your prerogative,then you pick a contractor, and
I'll say the last thing that wereally look for is do you have
the influence to actuallyimplement the changes that
you're seeking to make Right?
We've worked with leaders before, where we go through the effort
of coming up with a reallysimplified and much more
(41:21):
efficient process.
But then we realize that thatperson actually doesn't have the
political capital within theircompany.
Then you get stalled andnothing changes.
That's really just terrible tosee, because we've put a lot of
effort into it, not only fromour company but our client
sponsor that we work with.
That's just demoralizing thatyou can't actually change the
thing that you want to changebecause some other person has
(41:44):
some other agenda and they'renot allowing you to put that
change through.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Who may not have even been part of the conversation.
This is a perfect example ofwhere ego comes in.
No, no, no, no, no, don't workon that.
I want you to work on this overhere.
Yeah, you mean to tell me thatyou have a better understanding,
being way over there out of theoffice, disconnected from the
challenges that teams are facing?
(42:09):
This isn't the conversation of.
Okay, I'm going to go meet withthis leader.
Anybody have any issues?
Those issues that are beingsurfaced are I need somebody to
go talk to my partner, or can weget a decision on when our
budget is going to re-up so thatwe can continue to do
experiments?
Those are the kind of questionsthat go that way.
(42:30):
People are rarely looking atthis.
Stuff that we're doing day today is terrible.
Or it breaks, or the othergroup is never ready, or the
group is always asking us wherethings are, and I'm tired of
having to respond back to thingswhen they can just look at a
designated area to understandwhere the progress is.
There's so many little thingsthat we'd send to sort of sweep
(42:51):
under the rug.
And what do we do?
We create macros.
We double down on our Excel.
We hold another meeting.
I just recently was in asituation where I said it's
remarkable that the idea toimprove a process has evolved to
quarterly meetings with acertain lead, monthly meetings
(43:14):
with people within there.
I'm like, wow, so now you have16 additional meetings over the
course of the year.
Because that's communication,it's setting up meetings, it's
not, by the way, it's such acommon example.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
And, look, I think in certain cases, these tiered
structures of having thesemeetings with different levels
of leadership are useful in somecontexts, but for the majority
of companies that areimplementing this, they've
overblown it and they try toimplement it everywhere that
they can, and it just createsthis layer of disconnect between
what's actually happeningversus what leadership
(43:47):
understands.
Because you're playing telephone, whether you're in drug
discovery, portfolio managementor managing capital projects or
some regulatory submission thatyou have to coordinate, there is
a level of disconnect betweenthe people that are doing the
actual work versus the peoplethat are making decisions.
So, as we wind down thisepisode, what can our clients
(44:08):
expect as a result of theworkshop, but also through
working with us and this newapproach of tackling not only
workflows that are going to makeyou more operationally
efficient, but mitigating yourrisk?
What does that look like?
Right, you've mentioned before,there's definitely more
(44:31):
accountability, because now youcan see who owns what.
There's more confidence in howyou execute certain processes.
What do you see from your endas far as efficiency gains and
even how people make decisionsfrom a better workflow.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
I think what people have been realizing really
quickly is that when we come into work with them, it's about
them.
It's about how they've decidedto organize themselves.
It's about how they've decidedto construct their business.
There's no cookie cutterapproach here.
There may be some tools orframeworks that are used, but
the reality is we are trying toget in the weeds with you
(45:15):
because we want to put oureffort into understanding what
is it like to be in there.
We want to feel the pain thatyou guys are feeling so that we
can help your teams and whenthey engage with us starting
with the criticality assessmentand moving on into our trio of
services they can expect that weare going to become part of the
(45:36):
team, and more than oneoccasion I've had people that
thought I was actually part ofthe organization.
What you don't necessarily seeis how far you've hiked once you
get to the end.
Why is that?
Well, because once you startremoving roadblocks, people are
really good at filling the timethat they now got back with
other things.
Sometimes it's things that theyneed to be doing, Sometimes
(46:00):
it's things they probably shouldnot be doing, but they are
gaining time back, gaininginsights.
Their decisions are different.
Their decisions are different.
Their conversations aredifferent.
You're starting to find, whenyou carry the people through
these exercises, the right way.
There are more questions, whichis fantastic, Because why?
(46:20):
That means that people areengaged when they are asking
questions, when they're showingcuriosity.
Conversations these kind ofconversations that you have on
what we've moved into thissystem or this is what we've
done, this is how we've done it,this is how we've connected
reporting and metrics, et ceteramore familiar with seeing some
(46:49):
sort of an interface.
People are becoming morefamiliar from project teams that
have been initiating some ofthese things.
And then that stakeholder goesoh yeah, on my team I saw that
they started using this and nowI get all this information.
That's when you start to getpeople that go man, that sounds
way simpler and super easy.
You get this organic growth,but that doesn't come without
(47:11):
any work.
So a lot of what we understandis that digital transformation
is hard.
Focusing on digital workflowsis where we've decided is a
critical part of our operations.
Understanding the transitionsand the handoffs, because that's
really where things start toget mucked up, where we have
half of a story over there, halfa story over here.
Understanding the transitionsand the handoffs, because that's
really where things start toget mucked up, where we have
half of a story over there, halfa story over here.
(47:32):
We might have feedback inanother system.
Nothing is talking to eachother.
Everybody is working towardtheir own personal goal and not
what the rest of the team israllying around.
Where are we actually?
It makes no difference if weachieve our goal and our team is
not even in the ballpark.
They are five weeks away.
(47:54):
You have to get out of thismindset.
What we try to do is also reallybecome a beacon of this mindset
of how we work as a team, thatwe are part of a system.
That system is part of a largerorganization that is as complex
system.
That system is part of a largerorganization that is as complex
because, as you're well aware,we can outline a process, but if
they're still going out theside and sending out an email to
(48:15):
go this way and now there'sanother round of review, that
wasn't even a part of theprocess, that is where we start
to see some issues where we'renot actually following anything
that we say we are.
We want to be that hope thatpeople look for and change the
skeptics, the cynics, intoadopters of the solution into
advocates for what you're doing,Because the reality is we work
(48:37):
in very complex industries.
The work we do, in the manner inwhich we do them, should not be
the thing that slows us down.
The slowness or the hurdles orthe bottlenecks shouldn't be
your internal operations.
That's what we're here to saythat there is a better way to do
things.
Maybe you haven't had the timeto sit back, breathe and
prioritize, but that is what wedo.
(48:59):
We find the right mechanismsfor your teams to work together
with the resources they have.
Maybe we'll enlighten you withsome additional systems that you
didn't consider were plausibleto have in your organization in
order to make those connections,to maintain the resilience, you
want to have processes that, inan event where you have half of
(49:20):
your workforce taken away, youstill have a process there that
can function, can flex a littlebit and be agile, depending on
the changes that yourorganizations are in the
industry itself.
That is what really we'resetting out to do, and not have
people that are just underwater,treading water and unable to
work in the time that we have.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
If everybody had the same mindset that we had, we
would not be in business.
And, to your point, there's alot of positive momentum that
gets created when you go throughefforts like this to improve
the internal culture.
There's something to be saidabout a group of people that are
aligned with purpose thatgenerally that's a very good
(50:02):
thing, and people are willing todo this again right, because
this effort of whether you'rereducing risk or trying to move
faster, it takes a lot of workto do and you have a lot of
tough conversations and if youdo this right, people are going
to latch on and do it again,because this is an iterative
process and it takes time andyou have to go over and over
(50:23):
again Now they've seen changeand we've seen that with our
clients we're still working withclients that the first projects
that we have now are continuingto evolve because stakeholders
are saying we want more.
Speaker 1 (50:37):
Leadership is saying this is awesome, can we do this
over there?
Can we do that over there?
That's the kind of excitementthat comes when you're working
with us, that comes as a resultof being a part of our community
.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
That first step is always the same, no matter what
it's really focusing on whatmatters most.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
I think it's important to recognize something
here that what we're talkingabout is how Sigma Lab
Consulting is reframing andrepositioning ourselves just
ever so slightly.
We are still operationalexcellence.
That is where our bread andrepositioning ourselves just
ever so slightly, we are stilloperational excellence.
That is where our bread andbutter is.
That is where our hearts lie.
But we also recognizeoperational excellence does not
come alone.
We recognize, in these timeswhere funding is uncertain,
(51:20):
where there's politicaluncertainty in terms of are we
even going to have a workforcecoming up through academia that
is going to populate the needsof big pharma?
There's so many questions thatare out there right now.
But what we do understand ifyou're not looking to win,
you're looking to not lose, andthat's where risk mitigation
comes in.
So you're either trying to bethe best and try to have
(51:42):
operational excellence throughand through, or you're trying to
make sure that you are stillalive after all of this
uncertainty and that youroperations are resilient to
things that happen.
That is that risk mitigation.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
That's a great framing of it.
Let's just talk about whatlisteners can expect, and even
our clients and the rest of thecommunity, for what we've
discussed in this episode.
I think this repositioningshows us that you don't need
more digital systems.
It's just clarity around whatworkflows are making the most
change in your business.
If your team is stuck trying toimprove everything, this
(52:17):
episode gives you a really goodlens on start small, focus smart
and build momentum from there.
We're going to be doing a couplemore updates to the website to
really reflect this new framing.
Our linkedin presence is goingto change a little bit based on
some of the things that we'vetalked about today.
If you want to stay in touchwith us, you can email us at
(52:39):
info at sigma lab consulting dotcom.
We have a link tree with allthe different scorecards that
we've put together.
Obviously, this podcast and thewebsite itself will also have
all this information on here.
But, oscar, this was anothervery good episode and I'm sure
the next couple of ones arereally going to be diving into
this new framework that we'vebeen working on the last couple
(52:59):
of months.
Speaker 1 (53:01):
Absolutely.
I appreciate it, lawrence, and,like always, I think we could
talk for another few hours, butwe'll save some of those
conversations for another fewhours, but we'll save some of
those conversations for anotherepisode.
Welcome back to another episode of Lean by
Design podcast.
I'm your host, oscar Gonzalez,with my co-host here, lawrence
Wong, and we're taking a littlebit of a different approach.
Today we're gonna have aconversation about what we are
doing with Sigma Lab Consulting.
As you guys know, sigma LabConsulting is our consulting
firm that we've started and webrought on board the podcast so
(00:23):
that we can communicate some ofthese things that we are seeing
in the industry trends, changes,issues, challenges, things that
we're seeing across our domainsand how they relate to
operational efficiency and riskmitigation how do you mitigate
the risk of your operations tobeing a reason for having a
(00:44):
failing business?
So we're having a littleconversation here to talk about
things that we're recognizing inthis space and how we are
adjusting and repositioning ourapproach to what it means to
have operational excellence inbiopharma.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I think the general sense of operational excellence
seems to be this nice to have,but given the current state of
the economy, the state of ourindustry and life sciences,
there's a lot of I would sayrisks being very apparent in the
last couple of years.
Obviously, the one that sticksout is everybody hears about all
(01:24):
the layoffs, right, and soteams are shrinking, but the
workload is still there, andwhat we've seen with our clients
is people are really shiftinghow they spend their money, time
and resources.
So we've seen a lot ofcompanies really spend a lot of
money on making sure that theiroperations are still intact
despite some of these thingsthat are happening outside of
(01:45):
their control.
I think one of the things thatwe've tried to help our clients
do is really focus, and ourcurrent approach has been you
can find it on our website butthe three things that we really
focus on are being able todiagnose what our clients are
facing and then trying tosimplify whatever those business
processes are and then drivingadoption for that new way of
working.
When we think about where doyou begin diagnosing?
(02:08):
That's where everybody getsstuck is you have all of these
things that you have to worryabout, and we've been playing
with this idea of are youapproaching process improvement
in a way that is about makingsomething go faster, or are you
approaching it in a way thatyou're preventing something from
breaking?
And those are two differentapproaches.
Way that you're preventingsomething from breaking, and
those are two differentapproaches.
But what you end up asking isreally the same question at the
(02:30):
end is what's critical and whathappens if it doesn't work?
What happens to your business,what happens to your team, what
happens to the individuals thatare part of this workflow?
And there's a lot to considerwhen you are faced with these
challenges.
When things do break, we'resort of shifting our services so
that we help our clients reallynarrow down on what those
(02:52):
workflows are.
We've been a part of a lot ofcompanies that, unfortunately,
they do what leadership sayswhen they try to fix some
process and you wonder, okay,well, how did they come up with
that?
And there's not really anobjective way to quantify how
they came up with that decision,and what we're trying to do
here is help them come up with abetter decision on what to
(03:14):
focus on.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Let's take the listener in a little bit from
the beginning.
What are we used to seeing?
When people approach us aboutworking on a project or
developing a solution, Somebodycomes in.
What is it that they're comingto you with?
What is the information thatthey give you?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Usually comes in a couple of forms.
The most common one is I wantyou to do X.
And then the next question weask is why do you need that?
Because a lot of times, there'sa lot of assumptions around the
solution, even though there'snot.
Because a lot of times, there'sa lot of assumptions around the
solution, even though there'snot a really concrete
explanation of what the actualproblem is.
Oftentimes, what they're sayingthe solution is is just fixing
(03:54):
a symptom and not reallyfocusing on the actual problem.
So a really good example is wehave a lot of clients that use
some of these work managementplatforms like Smartsheet, and
they'll say hey, I need adashboard for X, I just want to
click a button and I want to seethis.
And you're like why do you needthat?
What problem are you solving?
They step back and they havethis confused, look on their
(04:15):
face and they're like oh well,we have all this information, we
just want to connect it.
And then, okay, well, whatdecision are you making when you
connect it all?
And then now you start to peelthe onion and start to figure
out okay, well, it sounds likeyou're trying to make a decision
on whether or not to approvethis thing, and I don't think
having a dashboard with all thisinformation is actually going
to help you, because you'reoverloaded with all this
information that you don't needto make that decision.
(04:36):
I think that's probably themost common thing that we see is
people come to us with thissolution that they have in their
mind without actually doing theeffort of diagnosing.
Is this problem even worthsolving?
Is this even a problem, and howimportant is this problem?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
You're also bringing in another side of it that
you've talked about in one ofyour LinkedIn posts, is the
difference between a consultantand a contractor.
You know a contractor, youmight expect I'm going in, I'm
doing whatever the client needs,but when you approach a
consultant, the idea is thatthey are going to make you think
differently about thechallenges or the issues that
(05:11):
you're approaching them about.
We have spent a majority of ourcareers being mindful about
what we were looking into orjust the fact that we were
interested in how do we makethings better.
We've gone into certificationswith Lean, six Sigma, with Scrum
, with understanding systems,theories and change management.
And when you talk aboutorganizational behavior and
(05:34):
maturity, where they are intheir systems and processes like
this is really where we havejust consumed all of that to
understand at a deeper levelwhat are these challenges doing?
What are these issues doing?
That seem to be a nice to have.
So, to your point, ourexperience is that when folks
are coming to us, they'vediagnosed themselves.
(05:56):
Well, we already did a look.
Okay.
Well, where do you want tostart?
We're going to start with this.
So you're going to start with aprocess at this juncture that
occurs once every quarter andthat is your highest priority
right now.
When you start to lay thingsout in that way, it has low
touch points.
It might have high value.
So maybe there is some sort ofprioritization, but any work you
(06:18):
do on that does not affect theday-to-day whatsoever.
So how about focusing on thethings that are slowing down
your teams daily?
Because those things willcontinue to compound, continue
to compound into people'svacations where they're on their
computers working, because ofhow slow things move, how stuck
things get.
When we originally positionedourselves, we had this notion
(06:39):
that everybody wanted to beoperationally excellent.
Everybody wanted to get all thecrap out of the way, that
everybody wanted to beoperationally excellent.
Everybody wanted to get all thecrap out of the way.
They wanted to have things morestreamlined.
Because you hear about iteverywhere.
You see it in personal goals,project goals, corporate goals,
where they want folks to becomeinnovative, to strive for
(07:00):
operational excellence.
But there's no real universaldefinition in any of these
companies of like.
What are we expecting?
What does that mean?
And so what do we do?
We attach ourselves to thething that burns us the most,
not the people around us, thething that we find most annoying
, or because my project is atthis phase and this is my thorn.
(07:23):
This is the biggest priority,but that's not always the case,
because your effort and thevalue of return might not match
up.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
It reminds me of that analogy when somebody comes up
to a doctor and says, hey, Ineed open heart surgery, and
it's like I think you just needa Tylenol.
You know, people reallyexaggerate the pain and I get it
.
It's so close to you, right?
You're like staring at a tree,but you're missing the forest.
But you really have to stepback to understand.
Okay, if I commit to doing thisthing, is it actually going to
help my team day to day, or isit just something that's really
(07:52):
annoying me, like a little flythat's in your apartment or
house?
That stuff can be reallyannoying, but in the grand
scheme of things, is it reallythat important?
Or should I be focusing on theroof that's about to collapse?
And I think the overall messagehere is that you can't fix
everything.
You have to decide how you'regoing to spend your time, your
money and your resources.
So we find that that's not avery easy thing to do.
(08:16):
There's a lot of politicalforces that are pushing you
towards something I thinkthere's not enough objective
analysis on.
Okay, this is the mostimportant thing for the company,
not just for my team.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
This is the thing that we need to look at.
That is exactly where everybodylooks.
No one dares question, or atleast there's not enough people
that question, and those are theother things we should be able
to.
You know, if you want to opendoor policy, I should be able to
ask why do you think that thatis the most important?
Did leadership have a powwowand talk to their teams?
(08:52):
Or did they have a powwow andsay this is what we see, but
what you see is not always whatis real?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Let's dig a little bit into what happens when
decisions like that are made fora improvement that doesn't
actually yield the results thateverybody is expecting.
I think you'll hear a lot ofpeople complain why are we even
doing this in the first place?
This doesn't change anything.
I feel like this is worse thanit was before.
There's all this noise at theend of it, but nobody makes
(09:19):
noise at the beginning, andthat's really where you need.
You need people to speak upabout these issues, and one of
the reasons why people don'tspeak up early is because
there's a level of trust rightwith your leadership to say, hey
, I think that they're going tomake a good decision on behalf
of us and the rest of the team.
You might have people that aremaybe more cynical and say, oh,
(09:40):
this isn't going to work out,and the whole point of that
beginning exercise is really tosurface those concerns so that
we know that when we go in thatdirection, we're all rowing in
the same way, because otherwiseyou're just going to be spinning
in circles.
So as we were preparing forthis episode, we talked about
what are those things that we'regoing to help tackle as leaders
(10:01):
face some of these issues.
So things like informationbottlenecks that delay critical
decisions that you're making.
Maybe there are handoffs thatare broken between teams.
Maybe you're doing a projectand you can't really see the
progress on real time.
Maybe there are some workflowsthat involve multiple
(10:21):
departments and information isjust getting lost.
How does that translate intolife sciences?
I can speak to the facilitiesmanagement side and you can
probably talk to the R&D, andthis is not just within our
areas of expertise, but ithappens everywhere.
And so in facilities managementwhat happens is every month
(10:42):
you'll get a set of work ordersthat come out.
Facilities management whathappens is every month you'll
get a set of work orders thatcome out and the technician is
supposed to take the work orderand schedule the time to do the
work on the piece of equipment,and so there's a lot of
coordination between theindividual doing the work, the
(11:03):
team that owns the equipment,the people that are preparing
the parts that you might needfor the work, and then there's
the whole documentation partthat are preparing the parts
that you might need for the work, and then there's the whole
documentation part.
There's the actually doing thework, closing out the work order
and then returning theequipment back to the owner, and
so when you have gaps in thatworkflow, there's a lot of
frustration that comes out ofthat.
You'll have people complainingabout why is my equipment not
returned to me?
I don't have what I need to dothe job, this is unsafe.
(11:26):
There's all of these things thatsnowball over time and you
imagine that's one work order.
Imagine just doing hundreds orthousands of work orders a month
.
How much wasted effort is beingspent on some of these broken
workflows?
And that's kind of thechallenge that we want to tackle
in our industry.
And I'm sure you can speak toR&D as well when you talk about
(11:49):
scientists being able tocoordinate their own work
between different functions andbeing able to provide updates on
their programs.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's wild because spaces within R&D, even in
clinical organizations now I'mgoing to separate the two,
because in a lot of spaces R&Das an organization develops and
they decide to onboard or takeon clinical operations, usually
the R&D space will start to sortof fade out because the
(12:15):
resource consumption that occursin clinical operations is so
high that it's very difficult tolift up charted path for
clinical operations while stillproviding resources into R&D,
where there's going to be a lotof rework because you're doing
hypotheses, you're exploringareas of science that are gray
(12:36):
or fuzzy at best, so there'sgoing to be constant iteration
and whatnot.
If we just talk about an R&Dorganization and let's consider
how complex some of theseprojects are.
So when we are transitioningfrom an academic institution,
you are essentially working as aparty of one.
(12:57):
You are an individualcontributor, you have your own
project, you manage your ownbudget, however good or bad, and
eventually you write a paper oryou do your dissertation or
it's part of your postdoctoraltraining.
But when you go into anorganization now your experiment
, your progress, your planningis everybody's.
(13:19):
It is your teammates, it is theproject teams.
These research teams are notfour people in a lab, they are
30, 40, 50 people with allvarying levels of very specific
expertise an mRNA expert,virology expert, an expert on
pancreatic cancer, animalhusbandry, bench work, bacteria
(13:42):
work you start to really balloonthe size of your project teams,
because now what's alsohappening is that the
requirements for you to provewhat's happening are even more
strict.
So now you have to conduct allof these other additional assays
, either in house or through aCRO, to prove what you are
saying to be, without a doubt,at least close to.
(14:04):
Without a doubt.
This is the mechanism that ournew compound does uses.
This is the distribution.
This is data on the ADMEabsorption distribution,
metabolism, excretion.
Here's a toxicology report.
Here's more information on thechemistry.
You're not talking about justone scientist that says, okay,
I'm going to grow some cells,I'm going to treat it with a
(14:26):
couple things at varyingdilutions and see what the
result is.
These experiments, thesehypotheses, are pretty large to
manage, and so what ends uphappening is you're going to
have your electronic labnotebook, probably a limb system
, but really what's missing fromthese spaces is that there's an
inability to project out, toplan, there's an inability to
(14:49):
forecast what you're going to bedoing over time.
Now, why is that a big deal.
Well, everybody is going tohave to forecast their budget.
They're going to have toforecast the activities that
they plan to do in the followingyear.
They're going to have toforecast goals to achieve.
And this is months before youeven hit the beginning of the
(15:09):
year.
This is like in the middle ofthe previous year.
I think a lot of companies aregoing to be starting in the next
two to three months doingbudgeting goals, et cetera.
I'm sure they probably justsolidified those goals.
There's this constant wheel ofchurning related to the
operations and when you start tolook at all of these different
pieces now, you're starting totalk about different tools,
(15:30):
different frameworks, differentways to discuss the work.
You know this one calls it atask, but because it's this
group and they're using JIRA,they call it an epic or a story
or what have you.
So as you're doing thesehandoffs, it is requiring
translation at every step.
(15:52):
Anytime you go in and out of asoftware, there's probably going
to be some level of translationwithin that handoff when you go
from one function to another.
That's another set of handoffhurdles that you have to get
through, especially when there'sa lack of consistency in how
you're managing or how you'remaintaining the data.
So what you end up seeing isproject managers that are trying
(16:16):
to get forecasts because theyhave to give information to
finance on where the budgetshould be stretching out, to
where they expect big chunks ofmoney to be taking in.
But you can't really get thereliability from R&D because
they can only see three monthsout and you're not going to get
(16:37):
a quote for work that you wouldplan to do at the end of the
following year from a vendor.
You have to kind of guess.
I guess from AI you can type insomething and say how much
would this cost me and maybe geta better number than just a gut
instinct.
But what ends up happening hereis that there's so many moving
pieces, there's so many people.
(16:57):
Everyone is essentiallydeciding how they want to manage
their work, especially whenyou're pulling in seasoned
veterans they have been workinghere 10, 20, 30 years and to
have them come in and now you'regoing to tell them there's a
way for you to do things herethat can sometimes jar people,
(17:17):
that can sometimes slow themdown because their desire to not
change the way that they dotheir work.
There's just increasing layersof complexity, and we're not
even talking about bringing inpartnerships because, as you
mentioned before the industry.
Right now we're holding cash.
People are not trying to dothings in-house when they're
already built elsewhere.
So what are they doing?
Acquiring?
(17:38):
They're acquiring and puttingmoney toward assets that are
already deep into the pipeline,deep into clinical operations,
in order to try to leveragetheir assets.
There are a number of patenteddrugs that are falling off the
cliff 2026, 2028, 2030.
A handful of staples that areout there and available.
(18:00):
Now they're going to slowlystart becoming generics, and so
now these companies are rushingto get something novel that's
out there, to give them another20-year patent cliff.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
To your point.
I think you're right about alot of companies, especially the
larger ones, focusing on thingsthat are later in the pipeline,
but the problem is still there,where you have these workflows
and handoffs that still have tohappen, right, it's actually
even more risk at that endbecause your product is much
more developed than it is at theearly stage.
Obviously, there's more volumeon the other end, but you're
(18:33):
much more focused on the laterstage, but there's still a lot
of complexity around how thesehandoffs happen.
Your point before you knowthere's there's just any time
that you have a lot of peopletrying to do something to make a
product get approved.
It just opens a room up for alot of mistakes to happen.
That's just the business thatwe're in, and so what I find is
(18:56):
that I think the really goodteam members will worry about
the people that are before themand after them and try to make
sure that whoever I'm gettingthis information from or whoever
I'm going to give it to, thatthey understand where I am.
Those are the best individualcontributors.
But that's not the full picturein a previous episode before
(19:22):
you have to look at the wholechain of events that happen and
how that information flows, sothat, as a process owner, you
know, actually, okay, the thirdstep in this process really
sucks and we're seeing a lot ofinformation being stuck here.
We need that to go faster,because it's really slowing
everything down.
And those are the best processowners, right?
I think what you'll find isthat the majority of process
owners go oh I have this metricthat I have to hit and I'm not
(19:43):
hitting it.
Guys, let's just throw thekitchen sink at this and try to
fix everything that we can, andwhat ends up happening is that
you don't actually solveanything and nothing improves
From the standpoint of twoproblems.
How do I know what to focus on?
And then the other one is ifI'm going to focus on this thing
, how much am I committing to it?
(20:03):
I think is really a bigquestion for people that are
really looking at theseimprovements.
Let's bring the conversationback to what we're proposing for
our clients workshop, wherewe're helping our clients
evaluate the criticality oftheir workflows.
I've shared with you before,but it's a really common thing
(20:30):
that we do in the realm ofreliability and maintenance, and
so how that takes shape is youhave a fleet of equipment that
you own in your facility, andthe idea is we don't have enough
people to service everything,we don't have enough money to be
able to invest in all thesedifferent sensors, so how do I
know what to focus on?
The idea is, if this thingstops working, how does it
impact the throughput of thefacility or the operation?
(20:50):
And then what's the overallreliability of this equipment?
Because if it's somethingthat's really important and it
runs really well, well I don'thave to worry about it.
But if something is reallyimportant and it doesn't run
really well, okay, now we needto focus the effort on fixing
that.
If you take that concept andapply it to all the different
workflows that are involved inthe different areas of life
(21:11):
sciences, you can really focusin on okay, the most critical
workflows.
And these are the reasons whyNow you can communicate that to
your teams, you can communicatethat to your consultants, your
contractors.
We all have the same directionthat we understand.
This is important.
It doesn't help when you justsend something down the pipeline
and people are like, where didyou come up with this and we
(21:36):
don't even understand the intentbehind it.
This is our attempt to help thelife sciences community really
hone in on the things that arereally important, because you
cannot fix everything.
That's just the reality.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
And there's so much.
And, as you alluded to before,as soon as you start peeling
that onion, you realize howrotten it is in the middle.
And not that any of theseorganizations are rotten, but
let's talk about how theorganizations scale.
Either they're developing anasset or they have an asset, and
they've taken in a huge slew ofmoney into a series A, series B
, whatever.
So now they're in this masshiring and now we have to
(22:10):
achieve milestones that we havealready projected out to our
shareholders, to our VCs.
So they're more driven on theprogress.
How far out can we get?
They're more driven on theprogress.
How far out can we get?
Now, the challenge is you needto be able to do that but also
cultivate some infrastructure ata steady state.
(22:31):
So what ends up happeningtypically?
Well, now that we're growing,oh, we need a new department.
Bam, here's a new departmentwith somebody that's managing
that.
They decide what tools areusing, how they're using it,
what they're going to do.
Bam, we need a qualitydepartment.
Here's another group, bam, weneed another CMC group to start
doing these things.
And you're without having theconversation.
(22:52):
You're building infrastructurethat is disjointed.
We initially started with adiagnosis, but our diagnosis was
more on the lines of where doesit hurt, not what is posing the
biggest risk to you, to thiscompany.
People that are in theorganizations now should start
(23:16):
to have this semblance of whatit means to have an
entrepreneurial mindset.
You have to recognize that, yes, we are trying to do
life-saving medications,therapeutics and mechanisms of
action that we're trying toattack, to circumvent this
disease.
But at the end of the day, youare functioning at a company, in
a business, and so you need tostart thinking about
(23:38):
operationally where are we mostvulnerable that things will just
stop?
Where are we most vulnerablethat things will just stop?
Where are we most vulnerable?
Where we would go down a rabbithole and then realize we should
not have gone in that direction.
You know, we spent a yeartrying to do inhaled and then we
realized that there wasmultiple papers that talked
(23:58):
about why people don't doinhaled medications for that
particular indication.
It's things like this, like howdo we avoid some of these
long-term disaster decisions,and part of that, I think, was
we took a look and said you knowwhat?
We have to take the reins andhelp them recognize all of the
different workflows.
(24:18):
You work very heavily withmanufacturing facilities.
I work very heavily with R&D,clinical operations, essentially
pre-commercial.
You know where you see tanks,gaskets and sensors.
I see the people, theirworkflow tools, their
notifications, stakeholder pool.
But when you put it on paperand you draw process maps and
(24:42):
flow maps, you wouldn't tell thedifference because they are a
system.
They are both systems that areparts of a whole, that are part
of an organization.
When you start to build processimprovement or start to improve
things that feel sluggishwithout having a North Star,
you're just going to have a lotof projects that will alleviate
(25:02):
something.
But is that the right thingthat you should be doing or the
right thing that you should beconcerned about right now?
Is this process that is once aquarter more valuable than this
issue that is happening three orfour times a week and slows
down the progress of a project.
For example, vendor management.
(25:22):
There's somebody that finds thevendor.
They talk to legal financeproject manager, make sure that
it's in the budget, they get itgoing, put in an SOW, get a PO.
Then there's this feedback loopof how much money has been
consumed, how much longer do wehave on the contract, are we
over budget and who is the ownerin that?
(25:43):
It's been my experience thatpeople in different departments
will point at each other and say, no, that's what you do.
No, that's what you do.
This is already a lack ofclarity.
But if you're seeing thatfriction and you're recognizing
that this is something thathappens almost all the time, it
slows down our projects by weeks, because there are many
(26:03):
different facets of science thatrequire a lead time.
To work with a CRO especiallywhen you get further down the
line and you're dealing withanimal work that require a long
lead time, you probably have awhole team of scientists working
on it.
For you to get 500 microgramsat a 37% purity, well, you're
(26:26):
going to have to cook up a lotof that stuff if you want to be
able to put it into an animal.
So that has a lead time.
So how are we identifying wherethe things could break, where
their impact is?
I think in a lot of places theprocess owner sort of lends
itself to like a departmentWithin the department.
(26:49):
They're like I don't know who'sthe one that manages that.
I know we manage it, but Idon't know who specifically.
That's very common and whatwe're doing here is we're saying
, look, before we start todiagnose, first we need to
prioritize what is really atrisk here, what is really going
to drive operational excellenceand decrease your operational
(27:11):
risk to where?
To your point, if this slowsdown, if this stops and it halts
progress for a month, that'sgoing to be somewhere you want
to take a look.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Another thing to point out is for people that
maybe have gone through thisexercise internally within their
companies.
These things change, right, asyour business goals, objectives
of your department or whateverchange.
You have to be evaluating thedifferent workflows that are
impacting your team and you haveto go through this exercise of
(27:42):
saying, okay, at this point intime, we've evaluated it and
these are the factors that welook at.
It might be something like howoften do we use this process?
How many times does this thingactually break down?
How long does it take for us tofix it?
How many other processes areaffected by this one workflow?
Because as you scale and grow,it just changes, right.
That's the only thing that'sconstant in this industry.
(28:05):
So you have to be very mindfulof doing this internal work to
evaluate which workflows are atrisk, and it's not something
that stays static, I would say.
For companies or people thatreally struggle with coming up
with a framework, this is wherewe come in and offer one
approach.
We're not saying that this isthe only way, but from our
experience in working in thisindustry and different teams
(28:26):
across areas of the business, wefind that the most effective
way to really think about thisis like what you said what's
most at risk and what happens ifit breaks.
Somebody might ask well, let'ssay I have this business problem
.
How do you think about theevaluation?
And so for us there's a set ofinputs and there's some
(28:47):
processing that happens using acouple of workflows and then you
get some output.
You really have to look atthose relationships between the
inputs and the outputs.
And what is that workflow thatis transforming that piece of
data or that handoff at the end?
And then you have to look atthe whole list and you have to
have some objective criteriawhere you're ranking everything
(29:07):
and then at the end of the day,you'll have a list of depending
on how complex your organizationis or how big the problem is.
You might have hundreds ofworkflows, but the point is to
narrow that list to 20%.
That caused 80% of yourproblems.
Right, the 80-20 rule here.
And when you fix that 20%that's causing 80% of your
(29:28):
problems, there's a ton ofbenefits.
That happens outside of justproductivity gains.
There's a cultural aspect thatwe've talked about so many
different times on theseepisodes.
That's really the push thatwe're making here is it's not
only fixing the things that aremost critical, but there are
other intangible benefits thatyou will feel from tackling
(29:48):
these challenges.
And just to give our audiencehow we're thinking about the
workshop it's not thismulti-month thing where it takes
a year to figure out what yourproblems are.
We're really coming in here andtaking a snapshot of what's
going on.
Our intention is to completethe in-person workshop or maybe
it's virtual within a week, butthere's a lot of pre-work and
(30:10):
post-work that happens.
We interview stakeholders toget a better understanding of
what you're dealing with.
It takes us time to come upwith recommendations based on
our own experience and some ofthe digital tools that you're
working with.
We're planning to have thisdone completely within one month
, and so within a matter of fourweeks, you've narrowed down
those workflows to give you moredirection on what you should
(30:32):
commit to for these improvementefforts.
Whether it's reducing risk,whether it's improving your
operations, you have directionon where to go, because you've
quantified that these are themost critical, and that's the
direction that we want theindustry to go in.
Whether or not you choose us tohelp you fix it, or choose
another consultant or anothercontractor, at least we all have
(30:54):
the same thing to work off oftowards improving whatever it is
that you have in your business.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
And I love this approach that we're taking now,
where you know we're going tosit with folks, we're going to
get more perspective.
You're not trying to boil theocean with interviewing
everybody in the company,because what we expect is that
there's going to be a little bitof friction.
We've seen that with a group ofstakeholders from different
functions that you're coming inand you're saying, okay, here's
(31:20):
the process as we know it.
Right away you get well, that'snot right.
Well, what's not right?
That's exactly what we want tocome in to do.
We want to make sure that we'rehaving those conversations.
That to your point.
Why are we doing this?
Oh boy, this isn't even howit's done.
You need to address that in thefront of the equation.
What this really does is itcreates a North Star for those
(31:41):
key stakeholders to say look,we've identified all these
different workflows thateveryone is having issues with,
but we have narrowed them downto these four focus areas.
These focus areas are thesubject of a deep dive diagnosis
who is involved?
What information do you have?
Where are the gaps?
How are you connecting yourworkflows with other functions
(32:05):
and their data?
Because the reality is, youcannot take a single data point
or a set of data points from onespace and assume that that's
giving you all the insights thatyou need.
You lack context.
In order for leaders to makedata-driven decisions, you have
to have enough context of all ofthe stakeholders and the
(32:26):
different areas that are alsorelated to that data point.
You can have the best datapoint in science.
Looking at the data by itself.
You're going to go this is ahome run, this is going to make
us a billion dollars.
And then you realize no one canmanufacture it.
We need a field of this type offungus or whatever in order to
(32:46):
cultivate enough.
So, oh, now let's do synthesis.
Okay, well, now you have a 45to 50 step synthesis of that
chemical.
Is that the journey that youwant to take right now?
That's going to be a lot ofresources, a lot of time to
hopefully produce something atthe end.
(33:08):
This is where you now have tostart taking the tasks that
you're doing and you need tostep back and start taking a
more strategic lens.
And you have to speak up onthose things, because the
reality is the people at the top.
They don't know the ins andouts of the things that are
happening and why, becausethey're not the ones that get
those questions or have to makethose decisions.
They're making more top-leveldecisions.
(33:29):
So it's important for folks tomake sure that they're surfacing
these things because as theseprojects continue to progress,
they will get more complex.
They will need additionalresources to capture data that
can convince the FDA that thisis a valuable asset that can go
into the clinic.
But you can only get there whenyour groups are talking together
(33:51):
, when your systems areconnected, when your alignment
in solving these challenges issound.
But if you just say everybody,go out and do process
improvement.
But if you just say everybody,go out and do process
improvement, you are going toget widely different opinions of
what operational excellence is.
Somebody might say, yeah, Iconverted my Word document to a
(34:11):
template for a PDF.
Amazing, also doesn't really domuch.
It helps this one person, butit does nothing to anybody
else's workflow.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Right, I want to step back and use an analogy that
people will be able to grasponto a little bit more and we
were talking about this offline.
What happens to baseball teamsin the offseason when they say
we need to get better?
That's not going to work rightBecause you have to look at a
(34:50):
ton of different things outsideof strength and conditioning.
You have to look at positionalplayers, the roster, the
salaries, the personnel aroundcoaching there's all these
different aspects of the teamand to just have a blanket
statement and say, hey, we'regoing to get better, okay, well,
where are we intending to focusin the offseason?
That's a huge question thatthese teams have to answer, and
I'm sure you're a huge baseballfan so you can probably go in on
(35:11):
each one of these aspects.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
You know hitting is different than base running, is
different than defense, isdifferent than pitching, is
different than conditioningyourself.
You have your trust within theteam but early on the back of
house in a baseball organization, the chief of baseball
operations the front office, thegm, all of these, these guys.
(35:35):
They're coming together andthey're saying where are we
lacking?
Well, we're recognizing we havea lot of talent in our bullpen.
So it's not a talent.
Maybe we need to change thecoach because we need somebody
to connect to them differently.
Or we're having some defensiveissues.
Well, this guy is also reallygood at that position.
Let's swap out these two andwe'll teach this other one to
(35:58):
play a position that has lowerrisk, because the amount of
balls that get hit in thatdirection are 40% less than if
he's on the other side of thefield.
These are things that now, withthe introduction of supermetrics
that was made famous throughMoneyball, the Brad Pittman and
Jonah Hill movie they'reactually taking data to
(36:21):
understand, to elevate theirinsights and have a strategy.
That's not just we need a heavyhitter.
Well, you need to get people onbase, because otherwise that
guy is just doing solo home runs, and when you got somebody
that's hitting home runs, youdon't want them to waste it on a
solo home run.
You want them to hit it withpeople on base.
So what do you do?
(36:41):
You organize your lineup forthe people that have the highest
possibility of getting on baseand sometimes you might see,
well, why is this guy hittingseventh?
But if you look at a team, youmight see a fast guy, a guy that
bunts really well or they canhit the gaps a power guy, and if
this power guy misses, we gotanother power guy behind him,
(37:02):
and then we have another guythat's also very consistent and
he's very quick, and then wehave another guy that's a power
hitter.
So at some point you are tryingto not necessarily stack all of
your power hitters in the samespace or the fast guys all in
one area, because you want to beable to have more opportunities
as you go through that lineupof putting people on base and
(37:25):
getting them to score.
So, in the same line of thought, like these are your tools.
Your tools are going to be yourequipment, people, technologies
.
We're seeing now people comingback from hitting a home run or
grounding out.
What are they doing in thedugout?
They're sitting with a tabletand looking at how did I swing.
They are reflecting on whathappened.
(37:46):
This is what separates goodbaseball players from great
baseball players.
They are reflecting on whathappened, something that we
don't do enough of, and I thinkthat as we go through this
workflow criticality assessment.
It is going to force theorganization, the leaders, the
stakeholders that come to thetable to really reflect and say,
(38:08):
okay, it really drives me nuts,but it's not that big of an
issue.
This is not something that isgoing to drown us that thing
over there that shows up everyweek and we sweep it under the
rug by creating this processthat involves extracting,
(38:30):
transposing the data, depositingit into somewhere else, sending
an email, getting a responseback, re-extracting it to make a
change, uploading it again.
These are processes that peopleare still doing.
Today.
You just spent six hours ofyour day on and off, jumping
back and forth for somethingthat could have been a lot less
(38:52):
painful.
It is interrupting your work,so you now don't have a workflow
.
Maybe you didn't even get achance to because you sent it
and then you ran to the lab towork on your experiment for
three hours.
So now, instead of somethingbeing done, sealed and delivered
on a Thursday, this processdoesn't even complete until
Monday or Tuesday of thefollowing week and we think,
(39:14):
well, that's just a couple ofdays and it's the weekend.
Try having that happen five, six, seven, eight times per person
over the course of a year.
That is a lot of time that isjust wasted.
I hear all the time.
I wish I had time to think.
Let me tell you right now whenyou look at a job description,
you are telling them this is howI think, this is my
(39:36):
capabilities and this is what Iknow.
That is what they're paying youfor.
They're not paying you becauseyou know how to pipette in and
out of a glass jar or anEppendorf tube.
That's not why they're payingyou the big bucks.
They're paying you to take thetime, slow down and reflect, and
that's what this does.
This puts our clients in aposition to reflect and say out
(40:00):
loud where the challenges arehow bad it can affect if it
breaks down and how hard it'sgoing to be to lift it back up.
How hard it's going to be ifthis person leaves.
Who is the only source ofknowledge on?
Speaker 2 (40:16):
this critical task.
You're really speaking to oneof the characteristics that
would make this workshop, andeven our efforts, successful,
and that's recognition of howcritical these workflows are.
Some of the other of howcritical these workflows are.
Some of the other things thatcome to mind are do you even
know what the pain points are ofyour workflow?
Because if you don't, then thatwouldn't help either.
I think another one to rememberis that there needs to be a
(40:38):
level of humility that comesfrom leadership to know that we
don't have all the answers andwe're seeking help.
Because if you approach this ina way where we know all the
answers and we just need to do X, well, that's really
closed-minded and what you'relooking for is not, like you
said in the beginning of theepisode about the difference
between a contractor andconsultant.
You're looking for a contractor.
(40:59):
You're just looking for someoneto execute, whether or not
that's right or wrong.
If that's your prerogative,then you pick a contractor, and
I'll say the last thing that wereally look for is do you have
the influence to actuallyimplement the changes that
you're seeking to make Right?
We've worked with leaders before, where we go through the effort
of coming up with a reallysimplified and much more
(41:21):
efficient process.
But then we realize that thatperson actually doesn't have the
political capital within theircompany.
Then you get stalled andnothing changes.
That's really just terrible tosee, because we've put a lot of
effort into it, not only fromour company but our client
sponsor that we work with.
That's just demoralizing thatyou can't actually change the
thing that you want to changebecause some other person has
(41:44):
some other agenda and they'renot allowing you to put that
change through.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Who may not have even been part of the conversation.
This is a perfect example ofwhere ego comes in.
No, no, no, no, no, don't workon that.
I want you to work on this overhere.
Yeah, you mean to tell me thatyou have a better understanding,
being way over there out of theoffice, disconnected from the
challenges that teams are facing?
(42:09):
This isn't the conversation of.
Okay, I'm going to go meet withthis leader.
Anybody have any issues?
Those issues that are beingsurfaced are I need somebody to
go talk to my partner, or can weget a decision on when our
budget is going to re-up so thatwe can continue to do
experiments?
Those are the kind of questionsthat go that way.
(42:30):
People are rarely looking atthis.
Stuff that we're doing day today is terrible.
Or it breaks, or the othergroup is never ready, or the
group is always asking us wherethings are, and I'm tired of
having to respond back to thingswhen they can just look at a
designated area to understandwhere the progress is.
There's so many little thingsthat we'd send to sort of sweep
(42:51):
under the rug.
And what do we do?
We create macros.
We double down on our Excel.
We hold another meeting.
I just recently was in asituation where I said it's
remarkable that the idea toimprove a process has evolved to
quarterly meetings with acertain lead, monthly meetings
(43:14):
with people within there.
I'm like, wow, so now you have16 additional meetings over the
course of the year.
Because that's communication,it's setting up meetings, it's
not, by the way, it's such acommon example.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
And, look, I think in certain cases, these tiered
structures of having thesemeetings with different levels
of leadership are useful in somecontexts, but for the majority
of companies that areimplementing this, they've
overblown it and they try toimplement it everywhere that
they can, and it just createsthis layer of disconnect between
what's actually happeningversus what leadership
(43:47):
understands.
Because you're playing telephone, whether you're in drug
discovery, portfolio managementor managing capital projects or
some regulatory submission thatyou have to coordinate, there is
a level of disconnect betweenthe people that are doing the
actual work versus the peoplethat are making decisions.
So, as we wind down thisepisode, what can our clients
(44:08):
expect as a result of theworkshop, but also through
working with us and this newapproach of tackling not only
workflows that are going to makeyou more operationally
efficient, but mitigating yourrisk?
What does that look like?
Right, you've mentioned before,there's definitely more
(44:31):
accountability, because now youcan see who owns what.
There's more confidence in howyou execute certain processes.
What do you see from your endas far as efficiency gains and
even how people make decisionsfrom a better workflow.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
I think what people have been realizing really
quickly is that when we come into work with them, it's about
them.
It's about how they've decidedto organize themselves.
It's about how they've decidedto construct their business.
There's no cookie cutterapproach here.
There may be some tools orframeworks that are used, but
the reality is we are trying toget in the weeds with you
(45:15):
because we want to put oureffort into understanding what
is it like to be in there.
We want to feel the pain thatyou guys are feeling so that we
can help your teams and whenthey engage with us starting
with the criticality assessmentand moving on into our trio of
services they can expect that weare going to become part of the
(45:36):
team, and more than oneoccasion I've had people that
thought I was actually part ofthe organization.
What you don't necessarily seeis how far you've hiked once you
get to the end.
Why is that?
Well, because once you startremoving roadblocks, people are
really good at filling the timethat they now got back with
other things.
Sometimes it's things that theyneed to be doing, Sometimes
(46:00):
it's things they probably shouldnot be doing, but they are
gaining time back, gaininginsights.
Their decisions are different.
Their decisions are different.
Their conversations aredifferent.
You're starting to find, whenyou carry the people through
these exercises, the right way.
There are more questions, whichis fantastic, Because why?
(46:20):
That means that people areengaged when they are asking
questions, when they're showingcuriosity.
Conversations these kind ofconversations that you have on
what we've moved into thissystem or this is what we've
done, this is how we've done it,this is how we've connected
reporting and metrics, et ceteramore familiar with seeing some
(46:49):
sort of an interface.
People are becoming morefamiliar from project teams that
have been initiating some ofthese things.
And then that stakeholder goesoh yeah, on my team I saw that
they started using this and nowI get all this information.
That's when you start to getpeople that go man, that sounds
way simpler and super easy.
You get this organic growth,but that doesn't come without
(47:11):
any work.
So a lot of what we understandis that digital transformation
is hard.
Focusing on digital workflowsis where we've decided is a
critical part of our operations.
Understanding the transitionsand the handoffs, because that's
really where things start toget mucked up, where we have
half of a story over there, halfa story over here.
Understanding the transitionsand the handoffs, because that's
really where things start toget mucked up, where we have
half of a story over there, halfa story over here.
(47:32):
We might have feedback inanother system.
Nothing is talking to eachother.
Everybody is working towardtheir own personal goal and not
what the rest of the team israllying around.
Where are we actually?
It makes no difference if weachieve our goal and our team is
not even in the ballpark.
They are five weeks away.
(47:54):
You have to get out of thismindset.
What we try to do is also reallybecome a beacon of this mindset
of how we work as a team, thatwe are part of a system.
That system is part of a largerorganization that is as complex
system.
That system is part of a largerorganization that is as complex
because, as you're well aware,we can outline a process, but if
they're still going out theside and sending out an email to
(48:15):
go this way and now there'sanother round of review, that
wasn't even a part of theprocess, that is where we start
to see some issues where we'renot actually following anything
that we say we are.
We want to be that hope thatpeople look for and change the
skeptics, the cynics, intoadopters of the solution into
advocates for what you're doing,Because the reality is we work
(48:37):
in very complex industries.
The work we do, in the manner inwhich we do them, should not be
the thing that slows us down.
The slowness or the hurdles orthe bottlenecks shouldn't be
your internal operations.
That's what we're here to saythat there is a better way to do
things.
Maybe you haven't had the timeto sit back, breathe and
prioritize, but that is what wedo.
(48:59):
We find the right mechanismsfor your teams to work together
with the resources they have.
Maybe we'll enlighten you withsome additional systems that you
didn't consider were plausibleto have in your organization in
order to make those connections,to maintain the resilience, you
want to have processes that, inan event where you have half of
(49:20):
your workforce taken away, youstill have a process there that
can function, can flex a littlebit and be agile, depending on
the changes that yourorganizations are in the
industry itself.
That is what really we'resetting out to do, and not have
people that are just underwater,treading water and unable to
work in the time that we have.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
If everybody had the same mindset that we had, we
would not be in business.
And, to your point, there's alot of positive momentum that
gets created when you go throughefforts like this to improve
the internal culture.
There's something to be saidabout a group of people that are
aligned with purpose thatgenerally that's a very good
(50:02):
thing, and people are willing todo this again right, because
this effort of whether you'rereducing risk or trying to move
faster, it takes a lot of workto do and you have a lot of
tough conversations and if youdo this right, people are going
to latch on and do it again,because this is an iterative
process and it takes time andyou have to go over and over
(50:23):
again Now they've seen changeand we've seen that with our
clients we're still working withclients that the first projects
that we have now are continuingto evolve because stakeholders
are saying we want more.
Speaker 1 (50:37):
Leadership is saying this is awesome, can we do this
over there?
Can we do that over there?
That's the kind of excitementthat comes when you're working
with us, that comes as a resultof being a part of our community
.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
That first step is always the same, no matter what
it's really focusing on whatmatters most.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
I think it's important to recognize something
here that what we're talkingabout is how Sigma Lab
Consulting is reframing andrepositioning ourselves just
ever so slightly.
We are still operationalexcellence.
That is where our bread andrepositioning ourselves just
ever so slightly, we are stilloperational excellence.
That is where our bread andbutter is.
That is where our hearts lie.
But we also recognizeoperational excellence does not
come alone.
We recognize, in these timeswhere funding is uncertain,
(51:20):
where there's politicaluncertainty in terms of are we
even going to have a workforcecoming up through academia that
is going to populate the needsof big pharma?
There's so many questions thatare out there right now.
But what we do understand ifyou're not looking to win,
you're looking to not lose, andthat's where risk mitigation
comes in.
So you're either trying to bethe best and try to have
(51:42):
operational excellence throughand through, or you're trying to
make sure that you are stillalive after all of this
uncertainty and that youroperations are resilient to
things that happen.
That is that risk mitigation.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
That's a great framing of it.
Let's just talk about whatlisteners can expect, and even
our clients and the rest of thecommunity, for what we've
discussed in this episode.
I think this repositioningshows us that you don't need
more digital systems.
It's just clarity around whatworkflows are making the most
change in your business.
If your team is stuck trying toimprove everything, this
(52:17):
episode gives you a really goodlens on start small, focus smart
and build momentum from there.
We're going to be doing a couplemore updates to the website to
really reflect this new framing.
Our linkedin presence is goingto change a little bit based on
some of the things that we'vetalked about today.
If you want to stay in touchwith us, you can email us at
(52:39):
info at sigma lab consulting dotcom.
We have a link tree with allthe different scorecards that
we've put together.
Obviously, this podcast and thewebsite itself will also have
all this information on here.
But, oscar, this was anothervery good episode and I'm sure
the next couple of ones arereally going to be diving into
this new framework that we'vebeen working on the last couple
(52:59):
of months.
Speaker 1 (53:01):
Absolutely.
I appreciate it, lawrence, and,like always, I think we could
talk for another few hours, butwe'll save some of those
conversations for another fewhours, but we'll save some of
those conversations for anotherepisode.
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