The Challenge
A major pharmaceutical company hired CMK Select to manage all of its therapeutic compounds in early development – from proof of concept to regulatory submission. The CMK Select team soon identified a need for a new process for transitioning projects from the pharma company’s development team to its brand team. The development team struggled with transferring critical pieces of information to the brand team during the handoff – each time a drug compound was submitted to the FDA for approval – which caused the brand team to often question the development team’s work or the decisions they made along the way. Ultimately, work was being repeated unnecessarily to fill those information gaps.
The Solution
CMK Select evaluated the company’s existing communication channels and pinpointed the areas where information was most often lacking or getting lost in translation. We then developed a centralized and fully shareable project-tracking tool that records all work done by the development team from the start of the project until the transition period. All information is organized and tracked under defined headings and marked by date. Each section serves as a means to track the work being done in all phases of the project, plus the tool acts as a comprehensive summary for the brand team to pull information from later on and even contains links to final reports.
As a critical second step in the new transition process, we advised the development and brand teams to organize a meeting of key stakeholders from both sides to review all information contained in the project tracker and to open up the proper avenues for communication going forward. When combined, the project tracker and meeting facilitate a smooth transition for hand-off from development to branding.
Results
By tracking and walking through the process with the brand team and presenting them with a complete package of information, the development team was able to bring their colleagues up to speed on the status of the project much more efficiently than had been done in the past. It also kept the brand team from having to perform any duplicative tasks and allowed them to take their work to the next level.
CMK SELECT 