0113. Seamless Teamwork and Strategic Tools for a Smooth R&D Operation

- Boost R&D team efficiency through collaboration and accountability
- Address inefficiencies in most R&D projects
- Cultivate a successful life sciences workplace culture
- Refine data for actionable insights and shared ownership
- Align project goals with corporate objectives
- Optimize equipment scheduling for lab efficiency
- Balance detailed monitoring with key metrics
- Promote teamwork, real-time communication, and delay prevention
- Streamline project management
- Foster accountability, leadership, and process improvement for innovation.

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For more insights and to assess your organization's excellence, check out our tailored scorecards:

1. R&D Operational Excellence Scorecard

• Evaluate your R&D processes and uncover opportunities for improvement. R&D Operational Excellence Scorecard

2. Clinical Operations Operational Excellence Scorecard

• Measure your clinical operations' effectiveness and identify growth areas. Clinical Operations Operational Excellence Scorecard

3. Facility Readiness Scorecard

• Assess your facility's readiness and discover strategic insights. Facility Readiness Scorecard

4. Maintenance Efficiency Scorecard

• Optimize your maintenance processes for peak efficiency. Maintenance Efficiency Scorecard

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Transcript

Lawrence Wong: 0:00

We're all on the same team and you have to kind of move in that direction, because you can't have everything silent. It doesn't make any sense because it's a lose-lose for both sides if you do that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 0:18

Welcome to Lean by Design Podcast. I'm your host, Oscar Gonzalez, alongside my co-host, Lawrence Wong. We are former MBA classmates turned business partners, with over 25 years of combined experience in life sciences, from R&D to manufacturing. Our experiences have shed light into the complex, ever-changing challenges experienced by this industry and many others. We took a risk quit our six-figure paying jobs in Boston biotech and pharma to start Sigma Lab Consulting. Journey with us as we explore the relationship between people and workflow design, the goal To learn, inspire and deliver practical tips to navigate these ever-changing challenges. Stick with us and learn to work smarter, not harder, and be lean by design.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:11

In today's episode, we dive into the heart of efficient project execution Collaborative workflows. 60% of R&D projects are hindered by inefficiencies. But what if we told you the key lies in fostering seamless teamwork? Today, we're going to explore the transformative power of standard processes, accountability and the art of distilling complex data into actionable insights. From the intricacies of asset management to the nuances of laboratory operations and everything in between. We're going to unravel the significance of cross-collaboration and shared ownership. Come with us where we create this future, where projects thrive on effective communication, concise messaging and their strategic use of data and tools. This conversation isn't just about overcoming collective challenges. It's about building a culture of success through shared experiences and insights. Join in to redefine collaboration in life sciences.

Lawrence Wong: 2:28

We're trying to figure out the next project on my queue, so there's a fair amount of stuff that you can standardize, but right now all they use is emails and then they have a ton of meetings and all of the things that you would consider to be in a process is there, but it's in pieces. I think talking about collaborative workflows allows you to put those things all together into one mechanism to manage those types of activities that should be streamlined.

Oscar Gonzalez: 3:26

Yeah, it's funny that you have that experience and that perspective because I see the same in a number of my clients where it's almost like all the data is there, all the information is there.

Oscar Gonzalez: 3:43

But we're so close to it that if you just take a couple of steps back and usually you're removing yourself which is why people ask for us to come in because we can come right in, remove ourselves and look at, okay, what do you guys have to play with?

Oscar Gonzalez: 3:57

And then when you start to understand, oh, this team collects this type of information, that team needs this kind of information you start to make this sort of web relationship of what the function is actually doing.

Oscar Gonzalez: 4:11

It's been more than one occasion that I've worked with a client, developed a process map of their current process, and their response is whoa, that's what we're doing, but it takes a little bit to actually manifest. And so today, in talking about those collaboration workflows and in development projects, asset management, there's a couple of different spaces in there, from the collaboration workflows to agile management, the importance, the strategies, all those things we want to talk about today, and it's all super important. And I like the fact that this is one of the earlier episodes in 2024, because it starts to help you think about where do you want to be at the end of the year. I know some folks have already determined what their goals are, but there's others that are still trying to figure out what those goals look like, and I think having some sort of collaboration, data mesh, data mixing, information sharing workflow is key to have a successful 2024.

Lawrence Wong: 5:27

Yeah, you want to know where you're going to be by the end of the year and I think starting with what things require a collaborative workflow is really good to think about at the beginning of the year so you can track and monitor your progress towards whatever you're trying to do by the end of the year, rather than again having a lot of these fragmented pieces of information that, by the time December 2024 rolls around, you're going to be looking back at emails and SharePoint and PowerPoints and all sorts of sources of information to figure out okay, did we actually do what we were supposed to do and how well did we do it? Right, I think that's. The other thing, too. Is is not only did you achieve what you wanted to do, but how well did we do in those areas to get us to where we needed to be?

Oscar Gonzalez: 6:25

We often focus on the end product, whether it's a project, some sort of initiative, as representation of the success of a project. But that is just a point in time. That is literally a single point in time, rather than looking at the journey, because I've seen some successful projects in the sense of achieving their goals, but when you look at the process it took to get there, it was an absolute train wreck. There were colleagues that were yelling at each other, there were people that were dismissed from meetings and to understand that that actually happened in the project and to not do something about it in terms of that workflow, of that process, that's negligence from not only just leadership but from the folks that are working in there. No one likes that kind of stress, that type of stressful environment that you see that makes good television, that makes a terrible place to work.

Lawrence Wong: 7:31

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I think you know, if we want to maybe focus the conversation a little bit more on some of the nuances in projects and what you've seen, where do you think it's most beneficial to have these collaborative workflow set up? Because I think not everything requires a collaborative workflow, because there are some things that, to be honest, it's just open ended and you don't really know what pieces of information you're going to need to gather to kind of make a specific decision. It may be brainstorming or anything like that. It's more open loop and not closed loop. So for closed loop decisions, I'm more thinking of okay, how do we just manage tasks on a project, right? How do we know if we're progressing on the timeline and where are we in relation to the timeline and how far or close are we from achieving that milestone or whatever that year end goal is? What are your thoughts on where to really focus these workflows?

Oscar Gonzalez: 8:39

I mean, that's a really good question because it can be daunting. There are so many activities that are happening toward the project goal and in a perfect world, you would have corporate goals that inform on the types of goals that your project should include, and those project goals will inform on what those functions should include and those functional goals should involve, or should include, components of what the employees in that function are going to execute on. So in a perfect world, it looks just like that a pyramid. You have your people goal at the bottom, the next level is the project goal, the next level probably the program, the portfolio goal, and then you have some corporate goals as well. So it becomes a little bit daunting to try to go okay, well, how do we capture all these things that we need to? Well, let's just take a project, let's just call it, let's just say, an R&D project. In that sense, there are things that you know that have to be completed. You know, no matter what happens, these five, six elements of this project need to occur. Okay, what do you need to know in each of those stages and who are the stakeholders? So that's a common thing where we, you know, sort of go to like the functional line manager, and that's great. But that functional manager is probably on seven or eight projects. So where I tend to get the best information from, I start to create relationships with the direct stakeholders of those initiatives. So I'll always check and verify, so I will work directly with that person and then verify with the, you know, with the functional lead kind of the bigger picture. Hey, I saw Sally was working on this. We're expecting this. And then Kyle mentioned that we're going to get the shipment in for XYZ, so we should be prepared to make a decision on X. Do you see any any issues of that happening? And and you know, that sort of starts the conversation.

Oscar Gonzalez: 10:56

Now, these are things that we know and so there's sort of a two edges here that we have to look at are the things that we know that need to happen and the unknown. So, mind you, all these different things that we're talking about, like how to focus and where to focus, it's really going to depend on the end goal of your project. You know the things that you know. You can run those through workflows, you can run those through timelines and having that stakeholder engagement. I can't stress this enough. You cannot wait until the next project meeting to have these conversations. You know, slack has a really nice function where you click on a huddle and you could just message somebody and say hey, do you got 10 minutes for a huddle? Hey, I was looking at this information. I was looking at that information and I want to know you know, is this on par? Are we expecting anything? Any snags here?

Oscar Gonzalez: 11:56

On the other side of things, there are so many unknowns that accompany many stages, not just in the R&D stage, but even in, you know, a clinical stage where we have no idea what's going to come back from the regulatory agencies. They may tell us to run a new trial. So there's a mentality in a framework that is more agile in that sense. So, although we have the comfort of knowing these are the exact moments that are supposed to take place, we have to be prepared to also take on things that may be nuanced in that sense where this data suggests that this. So now we have to run this set of data before we can do any more in vivo data, before we can do any more in vivo experiments. Why? Because the data that we received from here was a little bit dirty, which makes us assume that there are some impurities. We have to understand what those impurities are and if they impact the mechanism of this particular compound. You know there's a plethora of things. So you have your known items, which would be more of your standard workflow mapping, connecting with stakeholders In your unknown, that agile relationship needs to be super tight with your project leads, with your project teams and functional owners to say, okay, well, now we have new information, let's build on that information and find the way to drive forward and, as we're talking about today, the collaboration network, a framework.

Oscar Gonzalez: 13:36

You're not always going to have that information ready to cascade throughout the team, so it's nice to have sort of a almost like a I forget what do they call that telephone list where you call all your neighbors. You used to call all your neighbors that now everybody just posts a Facebook message to the town Facebook page, but used to call all the neighbors, okay, now you call a phone tree. It's almost like doing something like that, that you need to make sure that things that are not standard need to be communicated, and I think sometimes that we forget that because we live in this sort of like. Well, this is the status of how things go and I don't need to say anything because we're meeting somewhere in two days. But those two days can move somebody else's timeline a week.

Lawrence Wong: 14:24

Yeah, I mean it sounds like from a very high level, the the. Where you want to really focus on these collaborative workflows is from like a top down perspective, like what, what kind of is the end goal? And we know, you know, these are the requirements to kind of get there, and and having a standardized way to track and monitor the progress is going to be key. But you also want to be flexible enough where there are certain nuances to some of these, like subtasks that you want to incorporate so it doesn't kind of get lost in the weeds.

Lawrence Wong: 14:56

And if it is some decision that impacts another function, you want to, you want to capture that. But you don't want to kind of bog down your workflow with like oh, here are all the things that I do, and like we need to monitor every single one, because at the end of the day, we only care about, you know, is these maybe three metrics that are driving this particular timeline Exactly? And you know from from what you've seen, how have you seen the opposite end of it from? You know, having workflows that are just way too complicated, where you can't even make sense of how far or close you are to the end goal, because they started from like a top or a down or bottom up perspective. It's a.

Oscar Gonzalez: 15:46

You make me laugh because in a recent experience we were and I may have talked about this on one of the other episodes, but we were looking at improving the process of onboarding external parties. So myself, being a consultant, I was very involved, not only in the process, but I was living the issues that were happening as we were delayed with SOWs, delayed with signing contracts and things getting stuck and getting pushed back. I was actually involved in that and showing guys you're, you're approving our point here that this is a problem. I can show you the emails, the date, the timestamps, everything Like this is why these needs to be fixed. And what I received was a five step workflow. What I gave was a 23 step workflow and it actually was met with some laughter of there's no way that we can show people that it's this complicated.

Oscar Gonzalez: 16:50

Now here's the catch Every single step was determined to be necessary by the functions that were involved. So we have to be really careful about building these workflows where it's easy to just say let me word vomit everything. I'm going to put every idea that you know, every possible scenario, but why are we developing workflows for a scenario that may occur 1% of the time? You know, and at that that scenario probably has some subtle nuances that you can actually just find a way to work around. You know that that is not really something that you can standardize. So when I, when I talk to people about building workflows, if there is room for scenario drivers, I would suggest on no more than two, two to three at the most, because at every point of decision you can start to have something that changes. Well, this is a no buy. You should also go back to do these three steps, but only if this is the case, only if you know. So you start to get these, like you know, scenarios that may be fresh in somebody's mind but in the reality of it only occur in such a small subset. So what ends up happening is you get this giant workflow that you know you could probably speak to, that looks like a circuit board schematic, and you're thinking this is just for me to turn in the document. It's like how, where do I start? Where am I supposed to start?

Oscar Gonzalez: 18:45

And in those scenarios that you have those large workflows, if they are key to your operations, there needs to be training available, and I'm not talking about email me if you guys ever. Of course, everyone knows that you can just email, but we're always so bogged down we tend to forget what we need to email. It's the last minute because we're so busy doing this and now I have to work on this process that I haven't done in nine months. Schedule a training. Schedule a training.

Oscar Gonzalez: 19:16

If these are issues that are happening over and over and over again, you need to establish a baseline, a foundation for the understanding of that workflow in the organization so that at the very least, as people are working together with their teammates, they can get 80% of the way there and maybe don't have to ask the simple questions of where do I get a login for X? You're listening to Lean by Design Podcast and we'll be right back after a quick break. Do you suspect your life sciences company could do things more efficiently? Maybe you're seeing costly workflow issues or maybe the work feels more difficult to perform than necessary, affecting Team Oral. If any of this resonates, reach out to the team at Sigma Lab Consulting for a free consultation on how we can develop and launch a custom solution fit for your team. Our consultants will build a custom workflow solution for your team to reach peak efficiency. Find out more at wwwSigmaLabConsultingcom.

Lawrence Wong: 20:27

Yeah, no to your point about planning or developing processes around the 1% chance that some process might occur in that particular way and just going way overboard on considering all different types of possibilities. You really have to look at the frequency of the types of events that would drive timelines to go a certain way. For asset management, I think the collaborative workflows are especially useful and I would say even required for the operation and maintenance phase of your asset lifecycle. At this point you're looking at maintaining and operating your piece of equipment and instruments that you have in your biopharma research and production facilities. You think of the three different types of activities and the first is going to be your planned routine events. These are going to be your preventive maintenance activities, your calibrations, things that you would normally do day to day, but there's just a large volume of those.

Lawrence Wong: 21:35

The second category is going to be your planned non-routine events. These are hey, we're going to have a shutdown, we need to replace a certain component. There's a lot of different considerations, but we've done this before and we may do this, not often, but at some sort of frequency. Then the 1% is going to be your I'm not going to say 1% because it's having way more often than it should be. Are these unplanned, non-routine events? These are going to be your ad hoc customer requests that come from manufacturing, or your scientists that sit at the bench? These are going to be corrective maintenance. Something failed when you didn't know and you have to come up with a way to fix that particular problem. A good example I like to think of is for oil change. You want everybody to understand how to do this consistently and you want it to be done at a certain time. You want consistent performance throughout.

Lawrence Wong: 22:36

But if there's a tree that falls on my car, I don't expect the mechanic to have some sort of plan together to fix the car because he doesn't think about that when somebody brings their car and oh yeah, this tree fell on my car, that's just ridiculous and nobody's going to be planning that far ahead or for those scenarios, because they just don't happen that often. My opinion on this is really just focus on the activities that have the most volume, which are going to be your planned routine events. Optimizing for that large volume, not only because it occurs a lot, but because it's going to take up the majority of your time, your money, your resources. It's going to be the most direct contact that you have with your customers, your clients. As an example, if I can't trust you to do something simple, why would I trust you to do something extremely complicated and long in duration? Establishing that rapport and trust allows your stakeholders to say okay for those big issues. I'm going to trust you to do this.

Oscar Gonzalez: 23:41

Isn't that funny, though we don't like to do these very simple tasks, that it's not my job or I'm above that task You're asking a simple question there. Well, if you can execute on this flawlessly, then I feel confident to give you this larger scope, this larger, more complex scope to continue working with. When you're working with assets, are you looking at everything that's within that facility? Are you looking at a certain section of the line to determine what those routine tasks are, or do you tend to look at the workflows separately, but how they connect? I'm wondering, have you found yourself where there's a routine high volume task that after it leaves this space, it no longer becomes routine for the next group, or the volume decreases for the next group? Can you touch on that a little bit?

Lawrence Wong: 24:47

In asset management you're going to find, at least for the bio-pharma manufacturing side of things, that the types of activities around preventive maintenance and calibrations are going to be pretty standard for each type of asset. A really good example is hey, I have to calibrate a certain scale. That is going to be done in a very streamlined and specific way. I think the variance doesn't come in Obviously. I think there are nuances in the different types of equipment. You may need to approach it a certain way, but for the most part I think there's a lot more similarities than there are differences in the work that is performed on the equipment. I think the variance really comes in planning and scheduling the equipment, because when you work with different owners of the equipment, they're going to want things scheduled at a certain time because they have some overlapping activities and so really understanding what scheduling constraints are going to prohibit you from doing those things, that'll help you move quicker.

Lawrence Wong: 25:55

If I understand that, mike here has a lot of media prep operations in the morning, I'm going to try to schedule that in the afternoon when his team is maybe in the office doing training or something like that. But you have to keep track of all these different owners of the equipment so that you can allocate the resources at a time when it's not interrupting them in their operation. I think an example that you can use for the lab is when somebody needs to certify a biosafety cabinet and they show up with all their equipment and then somebody's doing some sort of operation in the hood. You don't want the person to stop whatever they're doing and to get up and let that person certify the hood. You want to be able to schedule the time when the scientist is not working on it, because there's going to be a lot of downtime at certain times of the day. So, really understanding what is your process for planning and scheduling that activity? That should be streamlined and you should be able to monitor how well you are scheduling those activities.

Oscar Gonzalez: 26:56

That's a really good point and a great example, ones that I've been involved in before along that line, because when you're, let's say, you're in a biosafety cabinet, you're working with cells. A lot of times in the morning that's when you're sort of going in there, you're doing transfections, you're doing separations, you're kind of knocking out all your stuff so that you can allow it to take that six hour incubation and not leave at 8 pm. So it's a very good example of how to sort of schedule those things out. So I'm curious to understand from your perspective in many situations you'll have sort of an operations manager or a program manager, program project manager, that sort of you know. Does all of this pulling of information and where do you see the expectations of the team members within the collaboration workflow? And I want to understand a little bit of what your expectation is and what in reality you see.

Lawrence Wong: 28:08

Yeah, I think the where you're going to see the most engagement is at the.

Lawrence Wong: 28:16

It sucks that it has to happen this way, but at the day or the time that something is supposed to be performed, the worst thing that can really happen is you show up and then the equipment or the instrument is not available for the work to be performed. Right, having that availability is going to be key and so okay. Well then the question is how do we track the equipment availability? And that's a lot of engagement on behalf of the equipment owner, but also the team, to make sure that the resources are available to work on the equipment or instrument. When we decide that it's going to happen on a Wednesday at 9 am, right, if we show up at the instrument at 9 am, it's one thing to say you know, the scientist is still working on it, but it's another thing to say, hey, my guys are not here to work on it, because then that causes a lot of, I would say, stress and anxiety over. Okay, now we have to reschedule and change the date, and then now we have to get another slot for when this thing is going to be available. And I think having this can come in many different shapes or forms. You can have meetings, to kind of have these meetings where you pick a date and time, or you can have some sort of request open for asking the owners, okay, which time slots are most applicable for you Pretty much like setting up a meeting, right, you don't want to schedule a meeting when someone or something is not available, I think so when you think of the equipment owner, I think having accurate time slots for when something is available and really communicating, hey, these are some of the things that are going to be happening in the areas that you should be aware of, I think, disclosing as much information as possible to make sure that, when the work occurs, there's less interruptions from their end.

Lawrence Wong: 30:13

And I think, on the other side of it, the service side, they should be upfront about how long this is going to take, right? And so I love using the analogy of bringing your car into service. You don't want to bring your car in for an oil change and then realize it's going to take eight hours, when I showed up, for this thing to be done in an hour, right. So, being upfront about when there are going to be delays and then, just if there is a delay, just being open about it and saying, hey, we found this and it's going to take a little bit longer. But establishing that communication with the equipment owner as you're doing the work and then when you complete it, I think is going to be key, because everyone needs to continue back to what they were doing before, and we understand that these maintenance and calibration events are going to be pockets in time where something's not available, and so there's a schedule that people follow and they're expecting this thing to be done at this time, and if it's not at this time, it's great.

Lawrence Wong: 31:15

And if they return back to the work and they're able to do what they need to do, that's the perfect scenario. But the reality is there's things that come up and there's going to be delays. But you have to communicate those things. You can't wait till the person shows up and go oh yeah, we're actually going to take another five hours, because that's usually disruptive to not only them, but you've got to think about all the other people on their team that are expecting that individual to do that type of work right. And so when you delay something, you've got to think not just for that person, but what does that do to that department? What does that do to the team? And yeah, you have to be open and be able to have some form of communication with that particular person.

Oscar Gonzalez: 31:57

So we've touched on a couple of things that I think there's translation, translatability into R&D and even into the clinical space. One thing I think that there's a little bit of a subtle difference is that the I guess the appearance or the equipment owner that exists within assets and facilities doesn't necessarily occur within R&D or even in the clinical space, for example. So I've seen organizations that try and create like a signup sheet or create some sort of check in, check out system. Now it's riddled with inconsistencies because you're expecting A a person to come over here, sign their name, put a time that they need to use this particular piece of equipment. They go back oh this wasn't actually ready, I forgot that I had to actually go sign up for it, or I forgot to take my name off. Somebody needs to jump in right away.

Oscar Gonzalez: 33:09

How do you see the relationship of being able to essentially function collaboratively on these types of things without having that owner that may be present as an actual position elsewhere? So we have a lab manager, but their focus on shipments coming in, fixing things, coming and going, getting access to people, making sure that the chemical and the fire safety, all of that stuff is up to date, there's monthly check-ins et cetera. So you won't necessarily find an equipment owner for standard pieces of equipment across a laboratory. How would you approach that?

Lawrence Wong: 33:55

Yeah, I think this is a really good situation, just because I think it's very different than in manufacturing facilities, because there is what you would call a production schedule that ensures that certain activities are occurring in a certain cadence, just because things start to converge when you go further downstream. I think for labs particularly, my opinion is that you should design it into a workflow, right, so some sort of mechanism. If that individual does not exist is the lab manager or the equipment owner or the scientist they need to work with your facilities team to understand. Okay, if I have a maintenance event happen on this particular equipment, what is the way that we would request service and how do we schedule that? And then take a look at what is the process map for doing this and really design that scheduling and planning and scheduling into the process. So that may look as a maybe there's some shared file or some database where you can check off that something's available. And then on the other side, the planner schedule sees that it's green and then now you can kind of assign someone to that.

Lawrence Wong: 35:17

Again, that role traditionally has been an individual, but I think there are technologies out there that you can use. Again, smart sheet, really good example, right, you're almost managing these I would say, work orders as individual projects and you look at a project, right, there are predecessors, there are dependencies, and understanding what those relationships are will help you design what that process is. And I would say, just because you don't have a person who is responsible for that, doesn't let everybody off the hook to say that they're not responsible for contributing to that process. Right, so you know when something needs to be serviced.

Oscar Gonzalez: 35:59

You're talking accountability.

Lawrence Wong: 36:01

Yeah, I'm talking accountability, and you know when something needs to get serviced, it's not just hey, we're doing this on your behalf. Like us as a company, we want to make sure that the equipment is functioning optimally for our scientists or our manufacturing team.

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:16

You need good data. You need good data, you need good data you need to get.

Lawrence Wong: 36:20

You need good data, but you also need everybody to play the same game. You need everybody to say what can we do as a team to make sure that this work gets done? Not, oh so, and so says this isn't available, so I'm not going to do it, and like no, that's not what we're doing here. At the end of the day, we want science to continue. We want things not to be disrupted. Okay, so work with me. What do we do here to make sure that this gets done?

Oscar Gonzalez: 36:45

I mean, I think that's a fantastic point. There's such a need for accountability. You know, from my perspective within the laboratories, I think that it's easy for us to look and say, well, somebody's been here for longer, this is their deal, I'll just send them a quick note, and that note doesn't get sent for two or three days and that person never knew that the system was down. You know, these are these are things that I see, that I have seen in my experience, especially when I was working as a lab manager of. You know things that were down and you would find that there's a post-it note on it. Well, I don't come to this wing of the laboratory every day, so that post-it note screwed me on the day that I set up all of my cells. And now I have to try to find a collaborating lab somewhere within this, within this department, if I can use their equipment. You know, or use that lab's equipment or that lab's equipment. This is when I was working in academia, where you had multiple labs in the same space and, of course, you know, usually things do work out. But every time that you run additional experiments, additional assays within these systems, it does take a toll. They'll eventually have to get recalibrated, et cetera. It's just like driving a car. It's not a big deal for somebody to drive my car, but if they're using my car all the time, they should start taking foot in the bell here.

Oscar Gonzalez: 38:15

You know, I think accountability is something that we don't talk enough about. Early stages of our professional development, in life sciences, in biotech and pharma, you know there is a level of accountability. You know the whole idea of you see something, you say something, you know. If it's not the, you know, if you don't have a product owner, talk to someone who is, you know, your guide, your mentor, your colleague who's been there for a little bit longer. Hey, what's the process for this? And you know, don't be scared to learn something new. Maybe you will be tagged to. Hey, do you want to take on this system? Like you work on it a lot. Take that as an opportunity Now I have. You know, what people I think fail to understand from time to time is, the farther you go up the ladder, the more responsibility you have. So if you want to, you know, be a manager someday. If you want to, you know, be this workforce for good, and collaboration, etc. You better start showing those collaboration attributes as soon as you can early in your career, because that's really what's going to drive that development and you know.

Oscar Gonzalez: 39:28

Again, I'm going to put out that the one of the things that you mentioned was about designing these labs into the workflows of the activities. That needs to be a focal point for the laboratories themselves. So this is how it works. This is where we can jump in, for, you know, to hold ourselves accountable at these different stages. This person may be the product owner, but you are using it 90% of the time. So that's also yeah, I get that that person has that title, but it's up to you to make sure that you know these things are actually appropriately working so that we don't stop and we think, well, it's just two days.

Oscar Gonzalez: 40:10

I have seen a two day and if we use the example of regulatory submissions, two day delay over here means that you can't submit again for a month. So a two day delay is not a two day delay in every scenario. A two day delay could be a month delay, depending on what that item is. So we have to really understand what those workflows are and how our work impacts the rest of the folks that we're working with, the rest of the team, all of the other functions. Your work is not silent. The work you do impacts the work of the people that you're working with.

Lawrence Wong: 40:54

Yeah, and I completely agree.

Lawrence Wong: 40:56

And, you know, one of the other things I want to add is both from the the scientists, manufacturing side and the facilities and engineering side, is I think both groups hate when you have unplanned, non routine events, and a way to avoid that is to have this shared accountability and responsibility for making sure that when something needs to be serviced, it gets serviced right.

Lawrence Wong: 41:23

And so you know there, if you're able to, on the, the science system in manufacturing side, um, be able to spot things that may be not working well with your equipment or your instrument and to tell these, these little events to the facilities team, they may be able to proactively fix something before something catastrophic happens, right, yes, like it's almost akin to you know, talking to your PCP and saying, oh, but noticing this thing, with you know my body getting sore in certain places and and they can say, okay, well, maybe you need to stretch more or something like that and kind of give you some sort of early on diagnosis so that it could prevent something catastrophic from happening.

Lawrence Wong: 42:10

And I think on the other side of it, you know, having those good relationships with your customers and your stakeholders allow you to get in front of some of the bigger things that may be happening down the line that you may not be exposed to, right. So a really good example is going to be hey, you know, we're bringing in a new asset in terms of like a drug candidate that requires like so and so equipment to be moved in, and so, okay, well, that's good to know from a facility's perspective, because then they need to understand okay, do we need movers?

Lawrence Wong: 42:45

Do we need to, you know, reroute some plumbing, electrical like keep something cold keep something cold, you know things like that that allows them to again foster this collaborative workflow, right Understanding the needs of one another, understanding what drivers will change each other's you know scope of work and really just understanding that at the end of the day, this we're all you know, on the same team and you have to kind of move in that direction, because you can't have everything silent. It doesn't make any sense because it's a lose-lose for both sides if you do that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 43:26

It is. I mean, you know, the only thing I can say is that if you're somebody that wants to just kind of stay in your space, just do your thing and go home, it's probably not going to be science, because there's always some level of collaboration that is needed, because, you know, despite what anybody may think, the answers to a lot of questions that you have is probably what somebody else knows. You know we have to learn to collaborate, we have to learn to be, you know, collaborative, thought-provoking, accountable. You know to be proactive rather than being reactive, which is, I think, very common in small organizations that maybe don't have any redundancies. And I think the lack of redundancies is a way for organizations to say, yes, we're lean. I don't mean redundancies by having multiple people that are doing the same task. I mean it in the sense of, to your point, shared responsibility.

Oscar Gonzalez: 44:34

You can have an owner, but have somebody else that also knows what the heck is going on. If this is a critical piece of equipment, if this is a critical part of the workflow, if this is a critical part of the development of your new asset, your new compound, etc. Somebody else should also have a pretty good understanding with how things are working. I'm not saying they have to be the owner, but, you know, put somebody in that you know, allow them to grow from there. Maybe somebody that's a little bit more junior, that wants to sort of shadow. That's a really great opportunity, you know. So, actually, along the lines of what I'm talking about, how do we, how do leaders, foster these different needs of collaboration and strategies for cross-functional development, cross-functional collaboration? How do leaders really bring that to the forefront of their culture, within their function or within their project? What are some strategies that they could do to, you know, start helping people become more accountable and, you know, really have this two-way flow of information, rather than I only give information when somebody asks a question.

Lawrence Wong: 46:03

We'll be right back after a quick break. Yeah, so I would say my, I don't have any. You know multiple strategies. I have one strategy and it is to call it what it is right. So if you're in a situation where there a process should be there and it doesn't exist, or a process exists and it sucks, you just have to call it what it is and say this is shit. And if we know better, we can do better.

Lawrence Wong: 47:01

So you know where are those bottlenecks and gaps? Let's get everybody in a room and start brainstorming or start plotting out the process and identifying why is this taking so long? Ask those questions to really bring out the. You know the honesty in people to say, yeah, this doesn't really work because so-and-so is no longer here and this person used to do this.

Lawrence Wong: 47:24

Or maybe you know we don't have a system of record for keeping track of how things are serviced and you know really, just calling it what it is and being, you know, open about it, and so everybody can kind of bring their ideas to the table to see what we can do to improve it. And I think where I see people not doing that or they maybe they don't want to shake the tree or they're afraid that speaking up will lead to them owning it. I think again, like you said before, it's an opportunity for you to grow, don't you want to work in a process that is not only simpler but better, and the way that you do that is recognizing yeah, this is shit. We can do better.

Oscar Gonzalez: 48:07

You know it's funny. I will say this the more you learn about how to communicate with individuals of different shape, sizes, backgrounds, etc. The more likely you are able to have these discussions where the work does not drop into your lab. I just got called out of this and one of my clients a couple weeks ago Actually it might have been a couple months ago from now, but I sort of brought up guys, this isn't working. And you know, we started to elaborate and talk about it. All of a sudden one person goes like, all right, yeah, I'll take that on. And then I see two other folks laughing, two other project managers laughing or this director's laughing. It goes just the way that Oscar brought up this challenge and this issue. And then, you know, this Q&A employee over here jumped in and volunteered for it.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:03

It's like you don't have to always, you know, take in everything that comes in and, quite frankly, that's a danger zone. That's a danger zone because then you're going to start choking out what you believe your best workers are. Oh, let me give them everything. That's not a good idea. That's not a good idea. They become resentful, you know. They become this notion of just like. All these things fall on me but I don't get paid more. You know that's a very common thing to happen and so you have to be very cautious with doing things like that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 49:34

And I think, if we all are able to spread, you know the work that needs to be done and leverage our expertise, leverage our minds, leverage our abilities, you know, I think that's where leadership can step in, and leadership could be the leader of your project or the leader of the department. But, you know, if I'm assuming that most of these folks have one-on-one conversations, one-on-one project, you know, individual calls with those that report to them, you know, have the conversation. How do you feel about the you know relay of where do you get your information from? That's a really good question to ask when do you get the information you need to do, the work that you need to do? And if they say, well, I get a lot of it from the project meeting, there needs to be a change because there's so much that is missed from there. Why don't you start to look at this? This is a really good source, this gets updated, blah, blah, blah. You know, let's have a conversation with such and such.

Oscar Gonzalez: 50:38

I think you guys could also, you know, learn to share something. So I think it's also in the leaders camp to say hey, I see all these connecting pieces that are right now in silos and where we like to think that our function is not siloed from itself. A lot of times, I find that to to not be the case. It is siloed from itself. You know this. One person works differently than this person. Well, why does it take this person four weeks to accomplish that task and this person does it in three days? It's because this person came up with a new process and didn't tell anybody about it. You know you will get the credit. You will get the credit. It will come back to you that this was something that you established.

Oscar Gonzalez: 51:26

Share. Only thing I can say is share, share, share across your team, across your function, across your project. Share the responsibility. Share new insights that you may have gotten. Share new updates. If you developed a new macros for Excel that cuts down time, if you went into Smartsheet and created a new workflow that answers six or seven questions when before it was only pulling out, you know two or three answers. Share those things with your team. It makes no sense to be the best, fastest, you know, most outstanding athlete on your team. If you are just ignoring everybody else, that's also on your team, because you can't. You can't win that by yourself, right?

Lawrence Wong: 52:17

Yeah, I agree as well and, you know, from a leadership and management perspective, really give people the room to creatively design some new workflows if they see that this is an issue. Yes, because the last thing you want to do is call people out or tell them that what they're doing is a waste of time. If it really impacts what they do and I like this term, collective pain, right Understanding if everybody is feeling the same way, then why are we not doing anything about it? Right, it should be a no brainer, obviously making sure that it aligns with the you know the objectives and the goals for the organization. But again, looking at the frequency and the type of task that it is, if it happens a lot and it's really critical, yeah, you should definitely fix that.

Oscar Gonzalez: 53:14

I couldn't be more in agreement with you there. So I guess I want to end on one thing and I want to get your thought on this when do you see you know everything now, if you look at the last I don't know five, 10 years, from job descriptions a lot of cross functional collaboration, cross functional, you know, discussions, cross functional leadership, everything is cross functional, matrixed environment, everything. And we've seen the progress or in some cases, lack thereof, moving into that space. How do you see this cross functional collaboration I guess you could say evolving, given the plethora of new data sources, of new project management functions, of new AI. How do you see all of these things sort of working together?

Oscar Gonzalez: 54:19

And I'll prompt you with this it's my belief that as we have evolved in our collection of data, of information, of trend data, insights, that we've almost become less collaborative because we have all of this information here. It's my belief that that's not good enough, that we need to also share this information, because insights don't just come from your bucket of data. Insights come when you start collecting, when you start connecting that bucket of data to the other functions. Then you start to develop those insights on your goals, on your people, on the organization. Where do you see our future with cross collaboration?

Lawrence Wong: 55:17

I think there's a lot of different tools out there and there's a lot of data sources that you can collect. I also think that most people actually everybody is probably experiencing communication overload, where it's so easy to type on your keyboard and send a message and gather whatever information you need Especially if you're managing a project or assets or work orders to really distill it down to what are the key pieces of information and to find out what is the simplest way to measure those things. I think we still want to keep that human touch part of it where, just because you see a number, that doesn't automatically mean that it translates to X on your timeline. I still think there needs to be some sense of what do you think of this data point or this set of data. I think there needs to be a filter for certain things, especially if people don't know what to measure.

Lawrence Wong: 56:33

Don't measure everything.

Lawrence Wong: 56:35

I think there's a saying that says just because you measure, it doesn't mean it's important, and just because you don't measure, it doesn't mean it's not important.

Lawrence Wong: 56:42

So, really understanding the drivers for the project that you're working on and distilling the information down, because things are just really, really complicated when you measure everything under the sun and I think, if you look five, ten years down the road, I think the people that are going to be really successful are the ones that are going to be able to not only communicate effectively, but people that are going to be able to distill the data down to those essential points.

Lawrence Wong: 57:16

And you know this from your high level management meetings with some of your clients. There's too much going on and they need information to be concise, accurate, they need to be translatable, not only to their audience, but maybe some of their groups that may not have the same background as those people in the meeting. And the easier that you make the information to digest, I think, the more powerful the message is going to be delivered. So really distilling it down and simplifying it allows that to go much further than you writing a 30 page dissertation on why we missed the target last month, like that's not just, it's not going to work.

Oscar Gonzalez: 58:06

Beautiful example and you know I think we'll end with that that. You know it's not enough to simply regurgitate your data input. There's a lot of data out there. There's big data, small data, however you want to call it, and there's a saying if you can't explain the science that you conducted, it never happened. Data is explaining your output, your discussion, your conclusions. Those are the main points that you're trying to have people leave with. So to your point.

Oscar Gonzalez: 58:49

Leaders need to allow for that room to expand on new workflows, on how to become more cross collaborative. Folks need to become more accountable, that they are the sum of their team the sum of their team. They are not an individual MVP. That is not how it works. You all are to work together. You guys find ideas or solutions in your space. Echo those ideas or solutions. That's a really good thing. Don't keep it to yourself. So yeah, it's, it's. I think that there is availability there and, for those that are curious how to even initiate those things, there are a lot of career opportunities with being that owner. To really facilitate cross collaboration. There's a lot of leadership positions mid level leadership that really puts you in position to take in the data and be able to distill the finer points of the project, of the execution of the goals, and that's very, very critical. So, accountability, provide that space and take that time to also build those insights, not just spitting back numbers and here it's 50%, over there it's 22, over here it's 35. Well, what does that mean? Put that together into a concise message of what that means. And if you struggle with that, talk to your neighbor. What does this tell you? Because there may have a different look at the same data.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:00:46

Today we talked about the vital role of collaborative workflows in efficiently managing team workloads and achieving project outcomes, and it looks into the necessity of accountability and responsibility for smooth collaboration, especially when working with matrix teams. Open communication, shared ownership and acknowledging collective challenges is critical for successful teamwork. Collaboration can now seem as a buzzword for a great place to work. Sure, you can ask anyone a question without a feeling of angst. But how collaborative are you truly? Are you feeling of actively pushing information out and somehow still out of the loop? That's not collaboration.

Oscar Gonzalez: 1:01:33

The future of collaboration is linked to how effective we can be with our data and our tools. That future serves to highlight the need for simple data measurements, distilling into clear and concise messaging. Get there, acknowledge the need for cross collaboration, foster idea sharing with leadership and build that comprehensive understanding of your assets. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to leave us a review, like and share on Spotify, apple and Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're interested in being on the show or becoming a sponsor, send us a message at Lean by Design at SigmaLabConsultingcom.