Design a business planning process that enhances cross-functional collaboration and improves focus on business opportunities.
Challenge:
Mid-tier Pharma company moved to a customer-centric structure focused on patient outcomes. Their new approach required a collaborative cross-functional operating structure where sales, market access, medical and patient services worked together to develop a matrix level business plan. They needed to better understand their local markets and compliantly collaborate on opportunities within their respective areas. Effective business planning was a key priority within the new structure. However, they had never successfully developed cross-functional business plans and did not know how to design an effective approach and then train their teams.
Solution:
BCA Associates, LLC interviewed leaders within all cross-functional teams, worked closely with legal and compliance and aligned with the project team, to design a comprehensive business planning process, a business planning application and a complete training plan for all levels of field teams.
The business planning process focused on assessing local markets, identifying market drivers or influencers, recognizing local business insights, prioritizing business opportunities, developing team priorities and building key initiatives and actions that supported their business priorities. BCA Associates, LLC then designed and developed a business planning application for each level of the organization. The business planning app allowed the teams to build cross-functional plans, and also build individual function-specific plans within the same plan.
Each level of the field organization was then trained using customized case studies and application exercises to guide the development of their business plans. By using pre-reads, pre-work and virtual training sessions, all cross-functional team members were trained on how to build an effective business plan. The teams were then provided with a quality rubric that allowed them to self-assess the quality of their business plans and refine them as needed. Overall quality of the business plans exceeded the expectations of the organization and the impact on business planning was evident immediately following the training.
