Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Today there was an interesting case study on Pfizer in the Financial Times and in FT.com (link: FT Pfizer Case Study for those of you with access). It describes a middle manager who observed that excessive employee time was spent on routine tasks in Excel and PowerPoint as opposed to the specialist tasks for which they are employed, in this case research. Does this sound familiar?

The idea was to develop a web based one stop shop into which such "grunt work" could be moved, increasing individual productivity. The article demonstrates how the manager identified uncertainties at the outset and adopted a gradual incremental approach with systematic measurement to evidence progress. As momentum gathered backed up by the evidence from measurement, a low cost pilot with trusted colleagues was initiated. The development approach allowed for experimentation and for errors to be fixed on the same day they emerged.

The case study runs through to a successful conclusion where once implemented this middle manager was accredited with saving circa 60,000 employee hours in the first year. Key lessons I would draw from the article include the vision to embrace the corporation in an adaptive way most likely to develop the support required to succeed, the iterative nature of innovation and development, and minimizing risks by dealing with uncertainties effectively up front.