Operating a business in the medical technology and life sciences industries is not easy. The stakes of every project are extremely high, not just to ensure that the company delivers value for itself, but to deliver value to customers that might mean the difference between life and death. In this business you simply have to get it right. We recently spoke to a health-tech company facing just this situation. Here's an excerpt:
What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
We have over 3,000 systems and applications contributing to just a small number of products that deliver customer value. This complex environment had resulted in the development of a number of custom spreadsheet solutions to understand how much money we were spending on each product, where effort was being expended and whether products were profitable.
Unsurprisingly this was an unsatisfactory solution for us – no one had a clear insight into what work was being done, why it was being done and how much it was costing. Our parent company was looking to spin us off as a separate business and we absolutely had to have accurate information – it was critical to our success.
How did you go about addressing those problems?
We focused on investment and cost management. Those were the areas where we had the least insight and where we were spending the most time trying to understand what was going on. We needed to get to an accurate picture of the total cost of ownership of every product whether that was customer support, agile development or any other category of expenditure. We also knew that we wanted a system that had a light footprint for users – we weren’t going to get accurate information if it took excessive amounts of time to capture timesheet data or to allocate costs to the right areas.
What did you do, and how did it help?
We implemented Clarity in conjunction with Rally, and we added some custom integrations to allow for cost allocations that worked with our complex business models. Rally handles all of the work management so that our engineering teams can manage and deliver all the work in the pipeline while capturing all of the time spent on different initiatives and products.
We fund our product teams through Clarity and we have a clear picture of the budget for every Release Train as well as actual and forecast costs. In Clarity we have a single source to understand all of our funding, forecasts and features, and we have that without anyone being taken away from where we need them to be focused.
How is this driving your success?
The shift from a massive amount of cumbersome, unreliable spreadsheets to push-of-a-button information is revolutionizing our business. It’s redefining what’s possible and allowing us to pursue initiatives that would never have been considered before. That in turn delivers greater customer and business value.
We can pivot our investments quickly and with the confidence that we are making the right decisions at the right time. And we can see the implications of those decisions to validate performance.
