10 Key Learnings to Deliver Success in Your Artwork Programme Implementation

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While working with clients to help them implement various artwork projects, the team here at Be4ward have learnt and recorded a number of key lessons along the way; things that we wish we had known at the start of some of those early projects.

We have captured these key learnings in this new series as useful tips to carry your Artwork Program forward. We hope these are useful in shaping your projects and delivering success to your companies.

Like all significant change activity, many artwork programmes commence, but not all are successful. Priorities change, resources are constrained, timelines can slip, funds can be withdrawn, and scope can be reduced: in other words, there are many different factors that can cause your artwork improvement project to fail.

Over the years, we have learned many lessons from our involvement in numerous labelling and artwork improvement projects that we believe are key to ensuring success. In the largest organisations, artwork capabilities involve thousands of people, working across many inter­nal functions, in more than one hundred countries, involving tens, if not hundreds of exter­nal organisations. The capabilities require the skilful design and management of integrated business processes, organisations and facilities, which are enabled by a suite of sophisticated information technology systems. In smaller companies, whilst the scale is reduced, the fun­damental challenges remain unchanged.

Establishing and delivering improvements in artwork capabilities is a significant, but achieva­ble change management challenge. Delivering change in this area requires the management of a complex interaction of business processes: people in many different functions, organisa­tions and countries using many, often validated information technology tools. This requires careful and skilled project and change management skills to do it effectively if significant compliance risks are to be avoided.

In this first article of the series, we will look at compelling urgency, sponsorship and vision.

Key Learnings

Key Learning 1

Compelling urgency — ensure business benefits are clear and a sense of urgency is built

Getting the necessary resources to implement any program is vital to its success. In most organisations, competition is strong for those resources, so the need to act now needs to be compelling.

The majority of pharma and biotech artwork improvement programs are ultimately justified on the basis of reducing compliance risk. Therefore, for senior management to buy-in to the need to act, a compelling link between artwork issues and compliance failures and/or near misses needs to be established. Establishing this link will normally require a significant amount of effort to gather information related to issues and analyse their true root causes. You should be prepared for the fact that, in some cases, labelling and artwork do not turn out to be the root cause of the issue.

Furthermore, even if this cause and effect link is clear, it is also key to ensure the urgency of improvement is clearly established in the minds of the decision makers. For the purpose of justifying change, a currently unacceptable compliance performance is ideal, particularly one which trending in the wrong direction. Alternatively, a significant change in circum­stance or environment which threatens imminent compliance issues can also be compelling. An example of the latter might be the merger of two companies.

Simply establishing the rational reasons for change and its urgency are not enough in many organisations. Considerable time and effort is then often required to “sell” this message to a broad group of decision makers and their influencers to ensure that, when prioritisation decisions are taken, enough of the right people back the artwork improvement over other programs.

Key Learning 2

Sponsorship — have you got the right Senior Management sponsorship for your project?

We talked about establishing a compelling reason for action in the last article in order to ensure your artwork change program is approved. However, once approved, the challenges to maintaining momentum and delivering success do not stop. Many significant change programs are subject to a continuous stream of organisational resistance that takes many forms. It is for this reason that identifying the right senior sponsorship is key.

Sponsors are senior individuals who are passionate and knowledgeable about the change, and have the seniority and influence to continuously champion the change across the or­ganisation and help navigate through the inevitable storms of significant issues and resist­ance that are bound to occur.

Typically, a sponsor will come from one of the functions most involved in the labelling and artwork process, the likes of supply chain, quality, regulatory or commercial.

Once a program has secured a sponsor, they need to find ways to keep the sponsor in­formed, engaged and interested in the program, so that they will continue to actively cham­pion the change.

Key Learning 3

Vision — collaboratively develop your vision involving all relevant stakeholder groups

Good business change management practice tells us that, in order to maximise the chances of successful adoption of any change, we should involve those impacted by the change in designing the future state. Given that labelling and artwork processes are, by their nature, very cross functional, cross-organisational and global, in our experience developing a vision of the future in a collaborative way is critical to success. We have seen a number of change programs have significant difficulty or even fail outright because they did not perform this fundamental step in a collaborative way.

It is all too easy for the labelling and artwork subject matter experts to fall into the trap of be­lieving they have all the answers and that it is just a matter of telling the rest of the organisa­tion how they should do things. After all they would argue, it is only logical that they know how best to do things as they are the subject-matter experts. Unfortunately, this completely misses the key point that implementing any change is at least as much about changing the “hearts and minds” of those impacted, as it is about getting the technically ideal solution. In fact, we would go so far as to say it is much more effective to have a sub-optimal technical solution that everyone buys into, rather than to have a technically perfect solution that is never effectively implemented.

Other significant benefit of developing the future state design with representatives from across the impacted stakeholder groups are:

  • Issues and resistance to the change are surfaced early and can more easily be dealt with at the design stage.
  • A more robust solution is more likely to be developed that deals with all of the local real­ities effectively.

So we would recommend identifying a suitable cross-functions, cross-geographic and cross-organisation team to be involved in a well-managed and facilitated collaborative de­sign development process. This team must be recognised by the organisation as represent­ing them for this to be successful. This type of collaborative design process takes time and commitment from the organisation, so needs to be built in to plans and budgets accordingly.

Furthermore, the collaborative design process should include all elements of the potential change and would typically cover:

·                     Processes

·                     Organisation

·                     Information

·                     Tools and IT systems.

The next article in the series will look at the importance of communication, your roadmap and keeping momentum.

For more articles from Andrew Love click here 

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