Unlock Better Healthcare & Pharma Marketing
With all the regulatory burdens healthcare and pharma marketers face, it’s not surprising they struggle to adapt to hyper competitive fast-changing markets. Long approval processes and endless red tape can hamper their ability to respond to market shifts and customer opportunities. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Think Healthcare Marketing Can’t be Agile?
With so much at stake in the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and life sciences industries, taking a bet on marketing agility requires a fresh approach. Fortunately, companies in these industries have already pioneered ways to unlock all the benefits of agility: responsive marketing that dramatically reduces waste while moving the needle on your KPIs.
Feeling Overwhelmed with Stakeholder Requests?
This is a common complaint from marketers everywhere, but particularly in the highly competitive healthcare industry.
Darci Helbling, Executive Director, Global Marketing Operations at Charles River Laboratories, described how they were in such a constant rush to fulfill stakeholder requests that they never had time to pause. Without space to evaluate how campaigns and processes were performing and develop improvements, teams were unable to adapt and improve.
By implementing limits on Work In Progress (WIP), the team at Charles River began to “stop starting and start finishing, allowing the team to focus on fewer projects at once, with the highest-priority work to get done first.” Within just a few months they saw significant improvements in project duration, cut project production time in half, and saw employee engagement metrics increase across the board.
How to Unlock Agile Healthcare & Pharma Marketing
If it sounds like Agile may be the key to tackling your toughest marketing challenges, how do you make it happen? Here are some practical steps your healthcare or pharma marketing team can take to begin transforming your marketing.
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Agile adoption and transformation deliver immense value. Recognizing that change can be hard and seems risky, the key is finding effective ways to minimize risk wherever possible. Agile pilots are an extremely effective way to do just that. You can think of this a bit like an MVP. You’re creating the smallest viable Agile marketing team capable of teaching you the lessons you’ll need to scale later.
That said, you need to be mindful of the V in MVP: your pilot program needs to be viable. That means full-time. Pilot or not, Agile simply does not work when it’s a part-time thing. All the backlogs, estimation, planning, etc. are built on the assumption that everyone is 100% devoted to a single team.
Another key to a viable pilot is the right leadership and support. Agile training and coaching are still necessary to begin cultivating the mindset that’s so vital for success. Senior leaders should also be on board and ready to provide active support and strategic direction. Otherwise, you risk pouring work into a pilot that gets shut down before it can deliver results.
You can see the value of an Agile pilot in action at Charles River Laboratories. There, a three-month pilot taught the team valuable lessons about how Agile should be implemented in their specific setting while minimizing risk. After the pilot, those lessons enabled them to successfully scale Agile to ten teams within the organization.
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From your pilot onward, cultivating an Agile mindset amongst your marketers is crucial for success. This is because Agile is far more than a set of practices. Here at AgileSherpas, we’ve seen many instances where teams are using Agile processes and practices but wondering why they’re not getting the expected benefits. Mindset is usually the culprit.
But how can your mindset sabotage your efforts when you’re otherwise “doing everything right”? In short, it’s due to the reality that Agile teams are built on a foundation of continuous improvement. They regularly evaluate their own processes and performance to determine what needs to change. But while such change is necessary, it can also lead to teams drifting back to non-Agile ways of working.
In other words, an Agile mindset is what helps Agile ways of working “click” to begin with. But it’s also what helps ensure Agile is sustainable in the long-run. Or, as we like to say here: “being Agile” is different than “doing Agile.” But how can healthcare and pharma marketers develop an Agile mindset?
That process begins with a foundation in Agile fundamentals. Once you understand the key Agile principles and values, you need to begin putting all of that theory into practice in your work. This is where you really develop a strong mindset, it’s applying principles to real-world challenges and seeing the results. Of course Agile coaching can also help in this process, as working with an experienced practitioner during the application phase can make it go much more smoothly.
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Every Agile marketing team uses one of three basic types of frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid. Choosing the right framework for your needs as a healthcare or pharma marketing team is an important step towards Agile success. But what are the key differences between them and how can you choose?
Begin by considering whether any other functions within your organization are already Agile. Using the same framework can help make working together easier, though case studies show it’s not essential.
In general, you can think of Scrum as the most structured and disciplined of the frameworks. It has specific team roles, meetings, and ways of structuring work. Specifically, it breaks work into sprints that generally last two weeks. The goal is to finish all the work you’ve decided to tackle within a single sprint. If the kind of work your marketing team does can be planned ahead and broken down into smaller units of work, Scrum can be a good option.
Kanban focuses on continuous flow and works well for teams where work does not need a lot of upfront planning but requires quick responses to requests. In Kanban, you’re also continuously optimizing your processes. Without the discipline and structure of sprints, it’s up to teams to set aside the time needed to reflect on their processes and find ways to improve.
The most popular choice among marketers over the past decade has been the hybrid (sometimes called Scrumban) approach. While these can vary, such approaches often involve working in a Kanban style but breaking your work into sprints). Done well, hybrid frameworks bring many of the benefits of Scrum and Kanban together. However, the flexibility also means it’s easy to accidentally introduce non-Agile practices that undermine the entire framework. For this reason, it’s best to work with an Agile coach in this process.
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Getting team design right is crucial for Agile success. The first element to consider is whether you can make your teams fully cross-functional. This is when the team contains all the people and skills needed to complete its work. All of those people should also be on the team full-time. On occasion this just isn’t possible or practical. In such instances, you should try and create a shared services team of people with specialized skills that could support a number of teams.
For example, if you’re in healthcare marketing but your team doesn’t need a full-time designer you can create a shared services or Center of Excellence team of designers that serves the entire marketing function. Importantly, you should use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to define the terms by which these teams will work with your cross-functional Agile teams. This will make such collaboration far easier and more predictable.
The other element of team design you should consider is stability. While Agile is built on flexibility and adaptability, that doesn’t mean your Agile teams should be changed all the time. In fact, at AgileSherpas we find it usually takes around 3-6 months for an Agile team to start performing at its best. So be sure to give your teams that time and stability they will need to reach their full Agile potential.
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Unlocking the value Agile can bring to healthcare and pharma marketing teams requires effective Agile training. That training comes in three distinct phases. The first is structured learning where team members study the Agile fundamentals. Importantly, this phase should only comprise around 10% of the total learning time.
Once they have a solid foundation in those Agile principles and values, it’s time to progress to “near-the-job” learning. This is when Agile coaching really comes into play because this phase is about working with subject matter experts, asking questions, and starting to apply Agile concepts to your real challenges. Think of this phase as a kind of bridge between the first and third phases. This second phase should take up only around 20% of Agile learning time.
The remaining 70% of a learner's time should be devoted to the third phase: applying all this learning on the job. Here, it’s all about integrating theory and practice to understand how you can practically apply Agile ways of working to your unique healthcare and pharma marketing challenges.
Agile coaching is particularly important during the third and final stage as this is when learners face the most hurdles. In particular, working with Agile coaches with experience applying its principles to healthcare and pharma marketing is important. Coaches lacking such experience may struggle to overcome the specific challenges that come with adapting Agile to such highly regulated industries.
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Once you’ve chosen a framework, built a strong Agile mindset, designed stable cross-functional teams, and gone through Agile learning, it’s time to start executing. But proper execution of Agile marketing requires finding and tracking the right metrics. Otherwise, there’s no way to effectively run experiments and track your progress.
Think of it like running a clinical trial. You need to understand what your success metrics are before you begin. Then you need to get your experimental design right so you can be confident in your results.
There are two basic types of metrics you need to be concerned with. The first are the usual success metrics that any healthcare or pharma marketer works with: customer acquisition costs, click through rates, etc. But the other category is more Agile specific and is used to track team performance.
For example, cycle time measures the time between when work begins on a task and when it’s completed. This is used to track how well work progresses through your workflow. If you’re seeing high cycle times, it may be time to try WIP limits, reexamine work phases, etc.
Throughput measures the amount of work your team completes in a given time period (usually a week or a sprint). By giving you an idea of how much work your team completes in a set time, you can predict when tasks in your backlog will be tackled. That information can be very useful for keeping stakeholders informed.
There are other Agile metrics you can use, but the key here is to set up your working processes to track this information so you can use it. Failing to gather data like this makes it far more difficult to implement and test the kind of process improvements that really drive value for Agile marketing teams.
In just 3 months, we are seeing a significant improvement in project duration and while our project volume is actually increasing across all of our Agile teams
