Case Study

Management Challenge:

• The Global Development organisation of a leading vaccines business was required to meet continuously increasing workloads over a projected period of 3 years at constant budget with a headcount freeze
• The Head of Global Development has put together a cross-functional team of the heads of all the main Development functions (Clinical, incl Biostats & Data Management and Medical Writing; Regulatory; Safety and Quality) to develop a Resourcing Strategy to meet the above objective for each function
• The internal project team requested for an experienced consultant to provide guidance on resourcing options.

Project Setup

• The project was led by a dedicated Project Manager from the business’ internal strategy group
• The independent consultant had worked with the organisation previously in another role and was asked to support the Project Manager as an SME
• Another independent consultant was contracted to support financial data analysis.

Approach & Solution

• The project was conducted in 3 phases: 1) Baselining of current workloads and resources; and projections for workloads for each function 2) Recommendations for changes in resourcing for each function 3) Implementation plans for each function
• Baseline analysis was used to classify resources under different types (onshore employed, onshore in-sourced, offshore employed in a captive unit, offshore outsourced, etc.) with FTE costs and outputs for each type in each function
• Recommendations were developed for each function with changes in the different resourcing types to deliver increased workloads at constant budgets
• A key part of the solution was increase in capacity of the captive delivery centre in a low cost location.

Benefits & Outcome

• Implementation plans were developed for each of the functions in scope impacting the entire Development organisation of 1800 FTEs
• The plans delivered on meeting increasing workloads for 3 years at a constant budget
• In most functions, the plans managed to keep redundancies in employed staff to minimal (which was a desired outcome), changing mainly the mix of insourced and outsourced resources.