Accelerating Pharma Transformation: How Integrating Consulting, Agile Development and Strategic Communication Drive Breakthrough Results
By Andreas Reinbolz, Thomas Nisters, and James Man
Summary
Pharmaceutical companies face immense pressure to transform quickly and effectively, driven by the competitive operational environment, cost pressure, rapid technological advancements, stringent regulatory demands and complex treatment innovations. The widespread adoption of Veeva across drug development and commercialization and more recently the introduction of AI in critical processes further accelerate the pace of required transformation. Traditional, fragmented approaches often fail due to entrenched cultural inertia, resistance at various organizational levels, and outdated processes. Through an illustrative case involving Syneos Health and pharmaceutical stakeholders, this paper outlines the practical challenges and clearly demonstrates how an integrated approach—combining management consulting, system development, and fully embedded communication—can drastically enhance transformation outcomes.
Challenges Across Organizational Levels
Today's healthcare organizations must rapidly adapt to remain competitive. However, this necessity often clashes with deeply embedded organizational cultures, fragmented processes and technical systems typical within the industry. A recent transformation initiative, led by Syneos Health, highlights key challenges at multiple organizational levels:
- Executive Boards face signing off on substantial operational changes in clinical development to transform organizational performance, often without fully understanding the ins-and outs and risks in clinical development.
- Senior-level Executives must effectively design and implement transformation initiatives that align global strategies with local operations, overcoming inertia and implement strategic initiatives, empower their teams, driving substantial operational changes in clinical development to accelerate timelines
- Heads of Clinical Operations must deliver operational excellence through proactive engagement and robust oversight while addressing legacy inefficiencies in clinical trial execution and move from transactional operations to relationship-driven practices.
- The larger Clinical Development teams are challenged with introducing and testing new ways of working while being asked to maintain or even increase their level of ongoing delivery of outputs.
In this context, the integration of AI-driven solutions adds complexity, requiring rapid adaptation and skill acquisition to maintain competitiveness.
Real-World Impact: An Integrated Approach in Action
Syneos Health recently collaborated with a leading pharmaceutical company to significantly accelerate its clinical development timelines. Recognizing substantial inefficiencies identified through benchmarking data, the company embarked on a comprehensive transformation journey. Syneos Health supported this transformation across several crucial areas:
- Management consulting expertise helped redesign the clinical development operating model, including clarity in governance structures and decision-making, streamlining roles within development teams to facilitate quicker, more effective strategic decisions.
- System development capabilities focused on replacing multiple legacy IT systems with a single integrated system, leveraging advanced technologies to enable real-time data analysis, reduce manual effort and significantly accelerate clinical development cycles.
- Communication and change management fostered a cultural shift by empowering employees, promoting accountability, and establishing relationship-driven engagement with clinical trial sites and patients, directly improving operational performance and engagement rankings.
The Three Pillars of Successful Transformation
This successful transformation was grounded in Syneos Health's three-pillar methodology:
1. Rationality: Rather than boil the ocean, focus organizational resources and management attention on the 3-12 things, which if solved properly, will have the greatest effect on performance. Here, three initiatives were prioritized, 1) standardizing the regional clinical operations model; 2) rolling out 4 x Veeva vaults; 3) standardizing the way of driving change through the organisation.
2. Commitment: Instead of resourcing staff to 0.1 or 0.2 of their time to initiatives, double down and assign staff full-time to accelerate delivery. Formally take them out of their day-jobs and have them dedicated to change initiatives. Utilize external resources as needed to supplement expertise and provide additional delivery capacity as needed.
3. People-Centricity: Prioritizing cultural change and employee engagement is essential. Articulating a clear end state vision, why that is better for each stakeholder and a roadmap for how staff will be supported so that they can excel in the new world, are vital to successful and speedy transformation. These skillsets are no longer abundant inside pharma organizations and so utilizing external expertise, versed in the latest thinking in behavioral science and why we resist, is critical to success. Scenario planning different engagement strategies, timings, communications etc., all made easier using AI’s help.
Clear Benefits and Impact
Adopting this integrated, comprehensive approach brought substantial measurable benefits:
- Dramatic acceleration of clinical development timelines, achieving an impressive ~400-day reduction.
- Enhanced operational efficiency through integrated technological solutions, improved data utilization, and reduced manual workload. Savings worth €10+ M delivered, with 600 staff worldwide able to spend more time on patient and site engagement activities.
- Increased employee and stakeholder engagement, directly improving organizational agility, trial site, and patient relationships, evidenced by sustained top 10 global patient and site rankings over the last 3 years.
For James Man, Syneos Health Programme Director, it is obvious: “The integrated, interdisciplinary approach combining strategic consulting, system development, and impactful communication was pivotal to achieving these ambitious goals, fostering collaboration, and ensuring sustainable transformation.”
Conclusion
The pharmaceutical industry's rapid evolution, compounded by accelerated AI adoption, demands a more cohesive, agile, and people-centered approach. The case involving Syneos Health clearly demonstrates the tangible benefits achievable through integrating strategic consulting, agile development, and robust communication. Organizations embracing this comprehensive model are positioned not only to manage current challenges effectively but also to lead future industry transformations, driving sustained operational excellence and competitive advantage.