Ever wondered how continuous improvement can propel your organization's growth to new heights? In this episode of Lean by Design, host Oscar Gonzalez delves into innovative strategies drawn from recent projects. Discover how you can transform data into meaningful metrics that drive success and ensure everyone is aligned with clear, visible guidelines.
Explore actionable tips for leveraging comprehensive checklists and team guidance to enhance workflow efficiency. Learn how making data-driven decisions can propel your organization forward and optimize team structures. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities, we show you how to streamline processes and enhance efficiency.
Additionally, we discuss a significant miss in roles and responsibilities—aligning responsibilities with documents, reports, and other critical project tasks rather than defining roles with broadly sweeping, generic definitions. Gain clear guidance on the responsibilities for deliverables across a project to ensure accountability and clarity.
Whether you're involved in project management, finance, or governance, this episode provides actionable insights to support your teams and ensure your organization runs smoothly and effectively.
Tune in to Lean by Design for these valuable insights in the second part of our essential two-episode series!
For more insights and to assess your organization's excellence, check out our tailored scorecards:
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. Reach out to leanbydesign@sigmalabconsulting.com
Ever wondered how continuous improvement can propel your organization's growth to new heights? In this episode of Lean by Design, host Oscar Gonzalez delves into innovative strategies drawn from recent projects. Discover how you can transform data into meaningful metrics that drive success and ensure everyone is aligned with clear, visible guidelines.
Explore actionable tips for leveraging comprehensive checklists and team guidance to enhance workflow efficiency. Learn how making data-driven decisions can propel your organization forward and optimize team structures. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities, we show you how to streamline processes and enhance efficiency.
Additionally, we discuss a significant miss in roles and responsibilities—aligning responsibilities with documents, reports, and other critical project tasks rather than defining roles with broadly sweeping, generic definitions. Gain clear guidance on the responsibilities for deliverables across a project to ensure accountability and clarity.
Whether you're involved in project management, finance, or governance, this episode provides actionable insights to support your teams and ensure your organization runs smoothly and effectively.
Tune in to Lean by Design for these valuable insights in the second part of our essential two-episode series!
For more insights and to assess your organization's excellence, check out our tailored scorecards:
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. Reach out to leanbydesign@sigmalabconsulting.com
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to another episode of Lean by Design podcast. I'm your host, oscar Gonzalez, again writing solo. On this one, we're trying to do something a little different, bringing you some short form content that really just highlights insights and learnings from some of the projects and some of the clients that we've had the opportunity to work with. So today, this is part two of operational insights from a recent project that we had, so let's just jump right in. Number six is a commitment to continuous improvement. So it's important to emphasize that there needs to be this level of commitment to continuous improvement, where every stride forward is measured and assessed and then refined for perpetual advancement. This is going to be crucial for maintaining that relationship, and so that relationship with partners, that relationship with peers, that relationship across departments and different functions. So, as you're growing your organization and you bring on consultants such as Sigma Lab Consulting or someone else who's really going to be driving a lot of those efforts, it's really key to rally the troops around that central idea that we want to make the workplace better. We want to make our inputs mean something and anything that you start to develop, whether it's a new way to capture meeting minutes or a new way to capture your team goals or decisions. You should always be looking forward to understanding how can you turn that content, that data, into metrics. You know, how many decisions did we go through over the last quarter? Are we making enough decisions? Does that make sense for the phase that we're in? Are we making the right decisions? We tend to just look at the activities that are happening right in front of our face and then the ones that are just within spitting distance. We don't really take a look at all these learnings that we've had from all the data that we collect. Especially when you're in a role such as project management, you have a large role in the administrative component of the success and the status of these projects.
Speaker 1:
Insight number seven a development checklist guidance. As you're going through your early R&D to look toward your top product profile, going into your clinical operations and running clinical trials. It's really important to make sure that everyone's on the same page. Very rare do you find sort of a guidebook of steps and milestones that are required within the organization. It's key to to make sure that these guidances, that these definitions of acronyms, of phases when funding might hit, when you might try to partner, if you want the best success out of your organization. These things need to be visible. There needs to be an understanding. Your employees, your workers are, in essence, business owners. They are business unit owners. They are required to manage resources. They're required to manage finance. They're required to report to some level of governance. They're required to manage the programs themselves, the progress that's a business. That is a business and you need to make sure that you are supporting your teams, and it's not by having an open door policy, it's by providing as much content and useful information for them as possible, for them as possible.
Speaker 1:
Insight number eight optimize your team structures. I cannot tell you how often we come up against whether it's something that was planned, such as a governance meeting or a budget or a research action plan, however you want to call it where the roles are not really outlined to who is going to be responsible for leading that charge, who is accountable, who should be consulted, who should be informed Not to say that everyone needs to have a RACI across every facet of their organization, but it's really key to outline the program, deliverables, documents and tasks. What we often focus on when we're creating roles and responsibility are roles and not their responsibilities Roles in the sense of this particular director of chemical manufacturing control. Their role is to provide strategy X, y, z. Now the problem with that is that the work in the day-to-day goes beyond your responsibility for the strategy. It's who is going to be managing the vendor, who is going to be turning in the budget, who is going to be creating a timeline for their space, who is going to be creating all of these scenario planning for their particular function. It's critical to make sure that you have sort of a responsibility assignment matrix who creates the slides for governance meetings? Who creates the documentation for the research plan? Who rallies the troops for budget spending and finance? Who does the monthly reviews and so on? So making sure that your organization is completely in line with the program deliverables, the tasks, the documents in that particular phase is so critical to success for those programs.
Speaker 1:
Insight number nine your governance meetings. As organizations grow from small 10, 15, 20-person companies to even just slightly bigger than that 100, 150, the visibility begins to get fuzzy for leadership. How do you combat that? Well, usually there's some sort of governance meeting where the leaders of the organization are holding meetings to meet with the project leaders, one at a time or as a group, however, it may seem to then get a wider understanding of the status. But what's the problem? Usually, leaders are up against deadlines, trying to understand fully what's going on in a project, yet might be reluctant to looking through reports or looking at dashboards or one-pagers that are developed by a particular function, and instead resort to going into a meeting and attempting to have a full-blown portfolio conversation in two hours once a quarter, once a month, whatever the cadence is.
Speaker 1:
It's really important to make sure that you are allowing yourselves to digest the information that's happening, giving yourselves time to understand really what's going on in a particular project, and it's not going to happen in a single meeting. We have to leverage the technology. We have to give us content and insights so that when we have those governance meetings, we're asking questions related to the strategy. What does this mean for our strategy? Does this mean we have to change our direction? Does this mean we have to change our administration profile? What is really biting at this project, rather than giving updates? Everything's good, but why do the projects always feel so crazy when all the numbers seem to be fine? So it's super key to make sure that these governance meetings are also aligned on record-keeping formats. If you do not have somebody that is skilled at maintaining minutes, decisions, actions, you need to make that adjustment Because your organization is reliant, based on your governance structure, that you have decisional governing bodies, and they are expecting to receive feedback and decisions in adding real value to the organization. So our last insight really puts a lens on financial and budget management.
Speaker 1:
Finance and budget management, in the R&D space especially, is a very complex beast. Typically, you have some number of scientists that are involved in pushing the projects to new boundaries in the science, in chemistry, in whatever facet of life sciences you're working in. But we also expect them to be good with budgets, good with finance, good with contracts, good with managing vendors, but we don't ever really provide any comprehensive training. I once had a conversation with a PI that I used to work alongside when I was at my time at Boston University and I asked him about finance and about budgeting. He returned a comment that surprised me, where he said my role as a PI for PhD students is not to show financial literacy, it's to help them think like a scientist. But where do we end up? Our scientists are the ones that typically will come into roles of management, of leadership, of you name it, you know they move up, but we never actually give full-blown trainings to how you manage your consultants, how you manage your contracts as a scientist, how you manage your purchase orders, your scope of works, sows, your financial budgets, your financial budgets. It is critical that we provide this level of training and understanding, especially to the groups that we expect to perform the tasks that we're asking of them to manage the overall budget of the organization.
Speaker 1:
The common phrase you hear is garbage in and garbage out. Well, if you never actually established financial literacy as a scientist, does that make you a bad scientist? No, it makes you a bad financial planner. The problem is when we get into small organizations and you need to wear many hats. You are also responsible for the financial planning of a project and of the experiments therein. So, as organizations, it's super critical for us to introduce comprehensive training programs, create customized reporting to ensure there's accurate tracking, reporting and financial planning. Otherwise, you can just chalk up your budget planning to an educated guess.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening into the insights and we hope to bring some more of this short form content to you guys in the coming weeks. Take a look out, we have a lot of things coming down the pipeline. We're going to put these in the show notes. We have some assessments that we have developed for R&D, clinical operations, facility readiness and maintenance efficiency. So how efficient is your R&D organization? How efficient is your clinical operations? Are you ready to launch your facility, to now begin producing products? Is your maintenance plan as efficient as possible? Try one of these four assessments now and get a free report customized to your needs. Schedule a meeting with us and we'll bring you an even more detailed report so that you can find out ways to start bringing efficiency and operational excellence into your organization. Until next time, take care.
