Improving a Regional R&D Team’s Efficiency

Our client’s Asia clinical sciences division was falling behind schedule moving multiple new compounds through the company’s R&D pipeline. At the same time, they were struggling to decipher complaints from the team members in Japan and China about working beyond capacity and excessive complexity within the daily team operations. After two months of trying unsuccessfully to get the team’s go-to-market timeline back on track, the division’s regional director approached PFC for support.

PFC interviewed and surveyed team members to understand the situation. Superficially, the issues appeared related to cross-cultural communication differences. But when we spoke with team members, we discovered it was actually three operational issues that were contributing to the team’s low efficiency. We designed a one-day workshop to allow the team members to move from conflict to consensus on each factor. Through structured dialogue and discussion, team members analyzed the causes of the issues, generated options and formulated four concrete recommendations to improve team efficiency. The recommendations ranged from creation of a new role to outsourcing specific non-core tasks.

At the end of the workshop, team members presented their recommendations in person to the regional and global heads of the division. The two directors approved all four recommendations and implementation began the following week.