(upbeat music)
-: Back in 2019, Pfizer was on the precipice of big change.
We were about to pivot
from a very diversified pharmaceutical company
into a very specialized biopharmaceutical company.
Agility was really an important foundation
that we needed to lay, so we wanted to get started
with really applying these principles
and through the frameworks,
be able to make that a systemic change for us.
In partnership with BCG,
we envisioned with our senior leadership
really what we wanted to pressure test,
what we wanted to accomplish,
accelerating commercial transformation,
accelerating product development,
really applying agile to every aspect of our business.
At its foundation,
agile is about pivoting to customer centricity.
It's about co-creation and collaboration across disciplines
and across silos within the company.
It's also about making team members
feel safe to test and learn.
Without that psychological safety, that doesn't happen.
Executives assuming that agile is something
that's only applicable to digital initiatives,
is actually very common and it's a misconception, really.
At Pfizer, one of the main things that we wanted to prove
with our initial pilots was that it's not just about
some type of digital or process-centric way of working.
We would get resistance with people thinking,
oh, well that probably works fine over there,
but we're in a highly regulated space within Pfizer.
We can't possibly apply agile principles
because we're far too structured
or we need to be far too structured.
We quickly proved that not to be the case.
By applying agile principles,
we could actually apply that structure and those controls
much more quickly and readily and seamlessly
by building that work into the work of the team.
Future of content was one of our first ones,
and it's a great example.
That's a process that no one was satisfied with,
no one even understood it from end to end.
We applied agile principles,
brought this cross functional team together
to really deconstruct that process and put it back together,
and the results of that have been astonishing.
We were able to take 75% of the time that it takes
to get a piece of content reviewed and approved
out of this significantly painful and high-volume process,
which really frees up our people
to be able to focus on breakthroughs for patients.
The results and the impact have been really astonishing,
not just in the number of teams
that we've been able to enable
through agile principles and frameworks,
but also in the results
that those teams are able to achieve.
We're seeing things like significant acceleration
in the delivery of their product or service,
phenomenal co-creation, and breaking down silos
that allows these different business units,
different disciplines to come together
and work across traditional boundaries.
Taking projects and executing work for patients
has always been a passion.
Being able to do it faster, more effectively,
getting value more quickly,
and doing so in a way that brings people together,
that encourages equity and joy,
really is something that warms my heart.