Accelerating IT Service Delivery in Pharmaceuticals

Finding Flow

The "Finding Flow" stage commenced with a deep dive into the challenges confronting the client's IT support organisation. The globally dispersed nature of the teams, each managing local support tickets while also contributing to broader IT infrastructure projects, compounded the complexity. Several critical challenges, consistent with known impediments to operational flow, were identified:

• Flow Fog: A significant lack of clarity permeated the existing workflows. Teams operated with poor visibility into the status of work across different geographical locations, making it difficult to track progress or identify emerging bottlenecks effectively. The client’s Jira software, while powerful, was not being utilised optimally to provide the necessary transparency and shared understanding of the work landscape. This opacity hindered data-driven decision-making and often led to an inability to accurately forecast delivery.
• Misaligned Priorities: With IT teams spread across multiple continents and responsible for a mix of local and global tasks, achieving and maintaining alignment on work priorities was a persistent struggle. This frequently resulted in fragmented efforts, with different teams inadvertently working on conflicting or lower-value tasks, leading to delays in critical project milestones.
• Job Juggling: A common symptom of the overloaded system was the prevalence of high Work in Progress (WIP) levels, a key issue surfaced during the second Learning Sprint. This directly correlates with Job Juggling, where team members are forced to frequently switch between multiple active tasks, thereby reducing overall productivity and extending lead times.
• Missing Materials: The strategic goal to ensure "all work being captured, prioritised and visible to everyone in a single place" strongly suggested that, prior to the intervention, crucial information regarding work status and tasks was often scattered, inaccessible, or inconsistently documented. This aligns with the challenge of Missing Materials, where teams spend excessive time searching for necessary data or instructions.
• Process Variability: The initiative aimed to institute a "standardised approach to prioritization and evaluating size of work". This highlighted pre-existing Process Variability, where different teams likely employed inconsistent methods for managing and executing their tasks, leading to unpredictable outcomes and inefficiencies.

To address these interconnected challenges, Project4 Learning Lab worked collaboratively with the client's IT leadership to create a 'Releasing Flow Map'. This strategic plan documented the identified issues and outlined a series of targeted interventions. The core components of this roadmap included:

1. The systematic introduction and adoption of the Kanban Method. This was chosen to improve the overall flow of work by clearly defining, prioritising, and actively managing tasks, with a strong emphasis on limiting Work in Progress.
2. A comprehensive reconfiguration and standardisation of their existing Jira workflow management tool. The objective was to transform Jira into a central hub for visibility, transparency, and alignment across all global IT teams, incorporating features like "flight levels" to differentiate work at various organisational strata.
3. The facilitation of three, week-long "Learning Sprints." These were designed as intensive, hands-on sessions to rapidly implement workflow improvements while concurrently building the team’s practical understanding and capability in applying Kanban principles through an experiential, "scientific thinking" based learning model (Observation, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Review).

Taming Turbulence

The "Taming Turbulence" phase focused on implementing the initial, foundational changes outlined in the 'Releasing Flow Map', primarily through the first two Learning Sprints. The goal was to reduce system variability and establish a more predictable and controlled flow of work.

The first Learning Sprint directly addressed the pervasive Flow Fog and the "need for a common backing of work". Activities centred on visualising the entire workflow. This involved configuring the Jira boards to capture all IT support and project work, ensuring every task was visible, categorised, and prioritised within a single system. Teams were coached on new standardised methods for describing work items, assigning ownership, and assessing task health. The immediate impact, as noted in the sprint retrospective, was significantly "Improved visibility of work and dependencies between teams". This initial step was crucial in making process policies explicit and creating a shared understanding of how work moved through the system.

The second Learning Sprint tackled the challenge of Job Juggling by focusing on the high levels of Work in Progress (WIP). Drawing on core Kanban principles, the team collaboratively established and implemented WIP limits for various stages of their workflow. This was a critical intervention to prevent individuals and teams from being overloaded, thereby reducing context switching and improving focus. The Jira system was configured to support these WIP limits, providing real-time feedback to the teams. The retrospective for this sprint highlighted an "Increased flow of work by limiting Work in Progress", demonstrating early success in smoothing out the delivery cadence and reducing bottlenecks. This phase was instrumental in laying down the initial tracks for a more disciplined and efficient operational rhythm.

Accelerating Flow

Following the initial stabilisation efforts in "Taming Turbulence," the "Accelerating Flow" phase concentrated on embedding the new ways of working more deeply within the organisation and transferring ownership and capability to the client's team. This was largely driven by the third Learning Sprint and the reinforcement of practices introduced earlier.

The third Learning Sprint addressed the "need to engage the whole team in using the Kanban system". The focus shifted towards broader adoption and ensuring that the Kanban principles and the newly configured Jira tools became part of the daily operational fabric across all teams and locations. Activities included further consolidation and prioritisation of work, continued emphasis on reducing WIP to enhance throughput, and, crucially, the collaborative development of training content and a deployment plan for future learning sprints. This ensured that the knowledge and skills developed were not confined to the initial participants but could be scaled across the entire global IT organisation.

Coaching played a vital role during this stage. Teams received ongoing support in utilising the Jira boards effectively, interpreting the flow metrics, and adhering to the agreed-upon Kanban practices. Specialised training was also provided to the client’s Jira administrators, empowering them to make future adjustments and refinements to the system as their working practices continued to evolve. The explicit aim was to foster a self-sufficient capability within the client's organisation. By the end of this phase, there was a demonstrable "Transformation from limited or no Kanban knowledge to Kanban implementation and common practice in 4 weeks". The IT teams were actively using Kanban principles daily across three continents, fostering a shared commitment to continuous improvement and enhanced work flow.

Keeping Pace

The "Keeping Pace" phase is dedicated to ensuring that the improvements achieved are sustainable and that a culture of continuous improvement is firmly embedded within the client's IT organisation. While the intensive engagement period was relatively short, the groundwork was laid for long-term success.

A key outcome of the engagement was the development of a "shared team committed to making further improvements to increase throughput". This commitment was echoed in client feedback, with one leader stating, "we have a good commitment to continue working improvement cycle sessions in the future". This indicates a shift in mindset towards ongoing optimisation rather than a one-off fix.

The very structure of the Learning Sprints, based on a cycle of "Observation, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Review of Results," was designed to instil a method of scientific thinking. This approach equipped the team with the skills and mindset to continuously identify areas for improvement, propose changes, test them, and evaluate their impact long after the direct engagement with Project4 Learning Lab concluded.

Furthermore, the practical step of training the client's Jira administrators provided an internal capability to adapt their systems in response to new challenges or evolving improvement ideas, ensuring the tools could continue to support their refined processes. The development of training courses during the "Accelerating Flow" stage also provided the client with the resources to onboard new team members and refresh existing knowledge, crucial for long-term sustainability in a dynamic organisation. This holistic approach aimed to ensure the client could independently maintain and build upon the established flow, keeping pace with future demands and opportunities.