Client Cases
We have been fortunate to support our clients address a variety of business situations, issues, opportunities, and challenges. These client engagement cases may resonate with you and your organization; although highly inter-related, case are categorized by our three core service areas:
Strategic Clarity
Life Sciences Growth & Scale Plan
This global medical device company was enjoying significant growth and expected to see ongoing growth – potentially tripling the business in approximately five years. Working closely with the CEO and the CHRO, we led the process to outline a detailed business and operational plan (e.g., GTM & sales strategy, segmentation plan, core business processes) to grow and scale the business. After a robust data-gathering process, this work resulted in a two-day working meeting where the executive team clarified strategic priorities, outlined detailed solutions to address those priorities and challenges, documented
robust action plans (i.e., with clear goals, milestones, timelines, owners, etc.), and discussed a change management and communication plan to drive understanding, alignment, and adoption through the entire organization.
Software Company Strategy
This company restructured and re-organized to realize a new vision and growth plan, within in the context of its evolving client > product > network-focused and platform strategy. As healthcare continues to transform, this company needs to adopt its model to accommodate both anticipated and un-anticipated technology advances and innovation (e.g., wearables, embedded devices, remote delivery, big data/AI, etc.). All these advances will have a profound impact on how people interface with healthcare providers and how information is leveraged to improve service and health outcomes. We helped this client outline
these strategic choices and ultimately transform operations resulting in multiple functional restructuring efforts to increase focus and drive greater alignment of current operations to the future vision. This had major implications for where the client invests its time and resources, as well as clarify where greater levels of efficiencies are needed to simplify and focus efforts to these big bets (e.g., duplication of efforts across business functions; spans/layers; key management practices; key workflows & roles, etc.).
Driving Scientific Drug Discovery
This global pharmaceutical client was undergoing a fundamental shift in its Discovery research model, requiring significant change to how therapeutic areas interface with clinical support and platform organizations. This broader change necessitated a core support function to significantly focus their scope and bring more value to how the entire portfolio is managed, thereby enabling and driving the overall performance and productivity of the entire discovery engine. We worked with this client to outline these strategic choices, propose a new focused-scope purpose, and outline the operating model and
organizational structure that drives the new strategy.
Operational Excellence
Cross Functional Excellence: Clinical Operations
A growing clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of novel first-in-class small molecules was experiencing the common integration, coordination, and alignment growing pains that come with success. With a strong pipeline, and as they continue to invest in more complex trials across multiple indications, their operations (e.g., site activation and enrollment) becoming increasingly complex. With key Phase II & III studies that have a high level of external visibility, driving company valuation and the subsequent ability to invest and reach patients, it was imperative to accelerate the maturation and
implementation of a next-gen operating model. We worked with four key cross-functional business groups to identify key process challenges, outline revised workflows and inter-dependencies, modify roles and responsibilities, and perhaps most importantly, collectively establish operating norms and behaviors necessary for increased coordination and alignment.
Transforming Clinical Operations
A Clinical Operations organization from a global biopharmaceutical company entered into a strategic partnership with a leading CRO (contract research organization). Currently, it was outsourcing clinical operations to many vendors, while industry trends were shifting toward single strategic partners, which can eliminate multiple processes, drive consistent approaches, eliminate duplication, and increase responsiveness to industry/regulatory requirements. This case represented a major strategic shift, a major operating model change, and the creation of new centers of excellence; all of which resulted in significant
change to workflow and role requirements. Key to the successful execution of this new model was strong change management, which accelerates capturing the intended value of the partnership. Fully established strategic partnerships can accelerate speed-to-market by months and cost efficiencies can reach 25- to-30%, relative to transactional outsourcing.
Driving Sales Performance
A software company had built a robust partner reseller program that was maturing and required a shift to continue to drive the revenue growth it had enjoyed over a two year period. The existing sales model, which had developed organically based on the exceptional skills of some early sales people, was beginning to break down and not scale. After rigorous analysis to understand the challenges and the opportunity, we helped our client outline a new sales model/motion that capitalized on newly defined roles that were critical to the successful execution of the new model. We also created powerful success profiles that outlined the
capabilities necessary for excellence in these key roles. Because this was a significant transformational change to sales operations we provided change management support to help install and implement the new future-state model.
Driving Customer Value & Satisfaction
A technology customer support organization aimed to implement a solution support strategy and operating model, making a shift from supporting hardware and software products, to providing customers with integrated and seamless technology solutions to business challenges. We supported our client by creating a workshop-based solution designed to engage all managers around the globe to frame and address this challenge, enabling them as change leaders, and making recommendations to senior leadership for successful implementation. This work had a significant impact on the business: it directly led to the creation
of a new organization to drive customer self-service; large organizations were restructured to accommodate changes in workflow and operating processes; new skill sets were identified and consistently trained; new technology tools were created (e.g., collaboration tools to more quickly connect SMEs on customer calls and new “customer environment” tools to allow engineers to have a complete view of the customer while on service calls); goal setting and performance management processes were changed, affecting how employees are financially rewarded; and ultimately, several key metrics were impacted (e.g., increased Time-to-Resolve 34%, decreased hrs/Service Request 42%).
People Solutions
Leadership Excellence: Selecting the Right Executives
We worked with three different organizations (financial services, health insurance, and technology organization) to solve essentially the same problem: they wanted a better methodology to select higher-performing senior executives and reduce turnover at that level. We partnered to build the competency models that served as the foundation for this work; we created selection criteria and a rigorous process that could be trained to managers and recruiters; and we conducted executive-level assessments to make better-informed decisions during the hiring process. After a period of time, it was found (by the client organizations)
that this new methodology reduced turnover by 17% (defined as voluntary/involuntary termination within two years) and increased the likelihood of hiring top-performing executives by 14%. Our clients estimated, based simply on direct costs (e.g., hiring/recruiting, lost productivity) and not opportunity costs, that each “bad” hire cost the organizations nearly $1M. It’s important to note that “bad” hires were about capability mis-matches (as we define it); while traditional selection methods typically do not deploy the same degree of objectivity.
The Value of High-Performing Teams
The executive team at a biotech company wanted to do some “team building.” They recognized that to capitalize on the opportunities in front of them, they needed to work together more effectively and efficiently. We decided that we wanted to take an approach that integrated the “what and the how.” That is, we interviewed all team members to identify 3-5 key business issues that illustrate the importance and impact of improved team operating norms and dynamics (e.g., decision-making, communication, conflict management). By marrying team performance dynamics to the key business challenges they faced, we
established strong momentum for this executive team to work together more effectively, creating a truly high performance team that delivers superior business results.
Integrating Business Strategy with Leadership & Team Performance
A $5B global fintech organization had experienced significant growth, both organic and through acquisition to achieve that lofty status. The executive team had settled into place, with several new members from acquired companies along with several long-time members who successfully grew the company. The CEO understood that to continue the growth trajectory, the executive team needed to make some key strategic choices, address some important business topics, elevate the level of individual leadership capability, and