Growth-stage biopharma · Portfolio and delivery process
From Backfilling a Veeva Project Manager to a Revamped Global Delivery Organization
Growth brings more assets, launches, functions, and requests. Companies usually answer that scale by hiring more people or adding contractors. A better answer: work smarter first, then hire where the need remains.
A growth-stage biopharma asked us to backfill its Veeva project manager: keep the releases moving, keep the business partners informed, keep velocity up. We took the position and looked at the work. The queue held business requests with few expected outcomes stated. Strategic impact lost in a list of tasks and due dates.
We left with a team that now understands the meaning behind their work, and a roadmap leadership reads straight from the systems of record the team already works in. Other teams in the global delivery organization saw what our client could now answer and asked for the same process. It scaled because it worked for the people who used it.
The situation
Requests arrived from every function, each urgent to the person asking. The team planned capacity by feel. Business partners at the working levels requested effort without it ever being clear how it served the business strategy, and the team often could not tie the work to a business goal.
Leadership had questions, and the answers required research the team did not have. How much effort goes to strategic work, and how much to unplanned requests? In what direction is it trending? Which functions receive the most? What did the team plan, and what did it deliver?
The approach had fit a smaller company. New assets, new indications, and more functions now asked the same team for more.
What we did
We listened. We interviewed business partners and tied their asks to the company's goals. Those conversations produced the functional areas the team serves and the strategic themes the business had set.
We classified every request. Strategic work went to a theme. We assigned operational work to categories, and the categories showed where to reduce the cost to serve and where to automate. Both entered one funnel, in one backlog, in the tooling the company already owned. Nothing entered without saying whom it served and why. Value-driven prioritization replaced first come, first served.
We built the insights. Refreshed every night, they answered the open questions: the mix of strategic and unplanned work, effort by function, progress by initiative, and planned work against delivered work. The team's use of them grew in stages: it understood its own impact first, then added checks to shape and approve effort before the work began. That gave the team's leader a place to think through the larger efforts and keep the team from over-engineering solutions, and we set the principles that reinforce how things are done.
We coached the team through the change until it ran on its own. We ran the first retrospectives and grooming sessions, and led the team to shape and size its efforts around strategic impact.
What's running now
The team generates its roadmap from a clean backlog, by business area and strategic theme, in four horizons: now, next, later, and beyond. Leadership reads a view of value delivered. Nobody compiles a report, and the leader sends no follow-ups for status or updates. The product team's systems and processes feed the executive portfolio readouts directly to its capital programs.
IT leadership has set the direction: support more growth without becoming the bottleneck, working smarter before hiring. Now the insights make those decisions. The process scaled across the global delivery organization because the teams who saw it asked for it, and it runs without us.