Building a department from scratch

I love taking a vision and bringing it to life. I love the exploration, the challenge and the creativity. Creating a department from scratch was a great challenge!

I was working in a growing biomedical startup company that was preparing itself for worldwide sales. In the meanwhile, demand was growing clinical research and efficiency and effectivity were tested on larger and larger scales.

I was asked to build a planning department and gladly took the challenge. But where do I start?

As a project manager I had little experience in the planning department. I had some theoretical knowledge from my BSc degree. Management had only a vague vision of what a planning department should do — be responsible for Raw material and Final product levels. And that was where I started.

I describe this process as if it were linear but actually I repeated it several times. With every new insight and experience, I went through all the different stages again until it was integrated in the vision, processes, and day to day activities.

The company’s needs

First, I mapped the company’s needs. Why does the company need this department? What functionality is missing? What are the needs and demands of each of the company’s departments?

My first step in understanding this was meeting with all my relevant colleagues and collecting their needs and expectations. This tedious phase was only the preliminary one. Understanding the true needs is not just that easy. Often people have an elaborate image of what they want, but it’s not what they actually need.

Learning

First, I had to master our current processes, methods and programs. Then, I had to expand our horizons from outside. Using exterior resources, such as manuals, articles and books, I researched how to best improve our current practices and what the best practices are.

What’s right for our customers?

Equipped with this new knowledge I could start creating a vision for the department. What does it mean to be a planning department in a cell therapy company? What special needs does it have in contrast to “regular” pharma companies?

I answered these questions in writing and constantly went back to these writing to remind myself our vision and goals, rethink them and update them periodically.

From desired outcomes to processes

Once I had the vision in my head (and on paper) it was time for details. I truly love deconstructing a vision to feasible processes and activities.

We started going backwards from the desired outcomes and see what processes we need to support it. We wrote about 6 main categories of the department responsibilities, braking each one to 5 or more processes. We identified the improvements needed in the current processes and the priority of each process and created a prioritized list of processes that needed to be addressed while continuing to deliver on current requirements.

Getting into details

Each time period we took on a process and started breaking it into activities, resources, platforms, dataflow and databases. We identified gaps in the current systems and developments that needed to be done. We split every process to daily activities that were clear and doable.

This wasn’t always easy. We needed to design a new process that was not supported by our current systems. We had to lead improvement projects across the company’s departments, in order to support the company as a whole.

This had consequences on the various departments. As our projects matured the company’s departments increased their requests. Our modules needed to interface with other modules to work as a whole. To add on our inner challenges, as a biomedical company, we also had to comply with strict regulations.

My department’s improvement projects became cross-departmental projects.

Bench-marketing

While going through building and improving processes, I contacted two similar department in related field companies. They were very courteous to meet with us, share knowledge and compare methods.

I had three main goals from the bench-marketing- I wanted to compare how our new processes were similar to theirs’, I wanted to learn how our new processes were different and if so, do we have a good justification for these differences, and finally, can we learn something new.

Measuring and reevaluating

Finally, to confirm that we were indeed achieving the desired outcomes, we needed to measure. We needed metrics and KPI’s to verify if we were on the right track. When we did not receive the desired outcome, we went back and rethought our methods and processes. We created internal metrics and a dashboard for management and for the company providing this tool of constant self-evaluation.

Eventually the planning department grew more and more and took on more responsibilities and projects. We were not responsibly only for the Raw materials and Finale Product levels. We were responsible of making sure that our product was available for doctors to give to patients and all the stages in between.

In this article, I outlined the main stages that we took in creating our department. I did not cover the very important part of creating a good team. Being of great importance that needs to be addressed by itself.

The stages described are quite general so everyone can translate them to his own world. The framework I used has helped me in other projects too. I would love to hear your frameworks and thoughts!