Roche change management

A story about being a change agent by Karin Br端hlmann, Head of Controlling, IT & Services Group Patents at F. Hoffman-La Roche AG.

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Change, its greatest detractors, and what to do about them

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Nothing fails like success

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Over the past decade, disruptive innovation has reshaped almost every industry and department imaginable, leading to similarly ubiquitous advancements in productivity for sales, finance, marketing, and operations staff. Each year, we learn how to do more with less, and this change builds upon itself exponentially.

Until recently, legal departments were left out of this cycle of rebirth and refocus. This is starting to change – vendors are beginning to see real opportunity (and real money to be made). Major problems arise, however, in how they approach these opportunities.

To understand what customers really need, especially for a department as risk and change adverse as legal, vendors must make an effort to know what the process of change looks like for them. The best way to understand what success looks like is to explore the main sources of failure.

First, let’s take a look at some of the culprits that drive failure.

After that, we’ll discuss what we at Roche have done to manage change when adopting new technologies, and how we respond to market shortcomings.

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Pitfall nº1

Poor Project Management Good project management requires clear, consistent communication between stakeholders — all stakeholders.

When multiple departments within an organization have a stake in the success of the project, many times their definitions of what success means vary greatly.

When vendors approach such a situation, they see four departments

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with a need they can fill and think “this is an opportunity for four sales!”

This opportunistic approach is not in the best interest of the project.

The first step for a successful change is organizational alignment.

Until the entire organization can agree upon what success looks like and how it will be measured, success is impossible.

Solution

Clear, consistent communication

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Pitfall nÂş2

Endless Meetings

Who doesn’t love a good meeting?

Hours spent in a poorly heated room, never-ending equivocations, subtle political maneuvering, and no real progress are just a few of the great things to look forward to when it becomes time to plan an implementation.

Endless meetings are the death of progress.

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Discussion without execution is wasted time.

To plan for an effective change, meetings should focus on clear goals and defined steps that should be taken to achieve them. And then, those plans must be enacted.

Solution

Execution, effective, clear goals

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Pitfall nยบ3

Lack of Resources

Not every organization has bottomless coffers. For smaller companies, it can be impossible to get the attention of vendors. But those organizations have needs that are just as real (and fiscally promising) as those of industry behemoths.

Vendors should see smaller companies as an excellent source of industry insight and indicators

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of future industry trends instead of focusing on the single big sale.

A constructive, strategic dialogue has much more long term potential than a quick big sale.

By ignoring smaller opportunities, vendors encourage industry stagnation and contribute to the odds stacked against these companies.

Solution

Constructive, strategic dialogue

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Pitfall nÂş4

The Aspirational Vendor What is a vendor looking for in a sale? Do they desire to contribute to the success of an organization, or are they just looking to make some money?

When stakeholders evaluate solutions, they should keep the sales and marketing tactics of their potential vendors in mind. Sure, they say that their solution is perfect for your organization, but do the feature sets back that up? Are their claims verifiable, or is it all merely attractive smoke and mirrors?

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It is the vendor’s job to keep his or her company’s best interests in mind, but how that goal is interpreted can vary widely. Some vendors may recognize the supremacy of positive customer relationships, but others might be motivated solely by the bottom line.

That variance must be accounted for to allow an organization to make the best decision.

Solution

Positive customer relationships

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Pitfall nº5

Divisions Between Stakeholders

When was the last time you said “I’m so glad office politics are a thing!”?

Chances are never. But we have to acknowledge that subtle implications rather than direct communication and petty interpersonal conflicts can often introduce costly oversights, delays, and conflicts. These can

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manifest in crises when sweeping organizational change is involved, and dispassion must be achieved and maintained in communication and decision making if good decisions are to be made.

Toxic stakeholders should be addressed swiftly, or they threaten the health of the entire enterprise.

Solution

Dispassion, communication, decision making

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Pitfall nº6

Cronyism and Nepotism

“Full steam ahead! This project is going fantastically; we have a promising candidates for implementation that meet all of our criteria.”

And then comes the memo: the project lead’s roommate from university works at another provider. It doesn’t have vital

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features that we all know we need. It’s outdated. It’s painfully expensive. But at least those old relationships are being honored!

When personal relationships stand in the way of good business decisions, change will only lead to further division, resentment, and inefficiency.

Solution

Relationships stand in the way of good business decisions

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The Answer: A Change Management Advocate

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Management advocacy can be the linchpin to success

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These hurdles can add up and seem insurmountable, but all it takes for an organization to overcome them is a single person with the drive to push for success and the insight to combat sources of resistance.

At Roche, that person is Karin Bruehlmann.

Over the past five years she has been the project lead for a variety of initiatives that have driven success and modernization in the face of business-as-usual pitfalls.

Through the lens of four recent projects, let’s examine how centralized change management advocacy can be the linchpin to success.

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Project 1: Picking a good IP Management solution When it came time to introduce more control into Roche’s intellectual property management, Karin was assigned to lead the process of evaluating a solution. The first step was to conduct a process analysis with all the teams in the global patents group—12 teams across the US, Europe & Asia. With help from Yerra consultants, Karin and her team created a master document and defined a single process structure, and identified any deviations from that process they could locate.

From there, the team drafted a summary and defined the central theme for a single approach to IP management. This defined, unified approach allowed Karin and the project stakeholders to write a request for proposal (RfP) that outlined their minimum requirements.

It also fostered a uniform method of discussing the features they needed to develop a rationale for why they needed them.

The next step was market research. Karin’s team evaluated 25 potential vendors and, working with Yerra consultants, conducted their first Mini RfP round internally using materials made available by those vendors. In the first round, they ruled out 10 candidates who did not meet their minimum requirements.

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Next, they sent out an RfP via a standard procurement process to the remaining 15 vendors and began the bid process.

The analysis and selection process was then conducted by the core project team. The team created real case scenarios, prepared an agenda, and invited the top 10 vendors to the US together with the global Roche teams.

Every vendor was given a chance to demonstrate how their product performed in these real case scenarios. The project team then collected each individual’s input and their ranking of each vendor.

A second vendor show was arranged and executed, allowing a deep dive demonstration. A final anonymous ranking by the project team lead to the selection of one of the market’s most prevalent IP management solutions.

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Project 2: A First to File Document Management Solution for the Patents Group This project was begun in parallel with the previous one, and was born as a result of the patent group’s strategic road map.

Karin’s team’s vision required that Roche implement a document management system to augment the capabilities of the selected IP management system, and they attempted to have it ready when the system went live. Although it had to be postponed, it was implemented not long after and was accompanied by a successful training initiative.

One of the most vital internal components for both this project and the IP management project is Roche’s newly created change management board. This board is where all issues raised by users of these systems are communicated, reviewed, and decided.

There’s a specialized IP portal within which all these requests or issues can be entered and managed.

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Project 3: Joint Contract Management System (Procurement, IT & Legal) When Roche needed a global contract management solution, Karin was asked to jump into a pending vendor selection process. After weak project management in vendor evaluation (the preliminary stage of the project), teams within the company began to back out one by one.

Since this is a contracts-centric process, it was clear that Legal needed to be involved. After more than a year of regular meetings where people addressed their concerns and shared the same feedback again and again, the contract management module of a large ERP system was finally chosen as a solution for the project.

After some politicking, Karin was asked to join the calls and report to General Counsel and Senior Legal Management on whether Legal should continue to participate in the project.

Karin proposed having a global process and requirement session with all of the Legal teams worldwide. Time was short, but they managed to interview more than 34 teams within 2 months and create a requirement catalog.

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The case was escalated to General Counsel along with Top Management and again Karin insisted that always and every time the business should address what is needed—IT shouldn’t be dictating to business what they need.

After some back and forth and a workshop, she managed to grow legal into the driver position of the project. The system was implemented across almost every legal team within Roche worldwide in 2015.

Her will to align with the other project’s stakeholders like procurement and IT made this project a huge success. It is extremely rare for a contract management project that spans multiple departments to achieve what the one at Roche has done.

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Project 4: Cost Transparency When Karin started with the Roche’s Legal vision roadmap in 2010 the goal was to implement a single global Intellectual Property Management System, one global document management system and one financial platform. This centralized approach was desired in order to establish single sources of truth for each data type for the global Patent & Trademark Teams. After evaluating the top global e-billing providers and talking to small and large organizations, Roche realized that none of these solutions would be able to fulfill their complex requirements. Most only went so far as to offer access to static information.

On April 1, 2015, Roche began to track and analyze its global IP spend. While there the two US sites used unique e-billing systems, the European offices work with a mostly manual system. Each site had a different ERP/finance system.

Consequently, Roche collects global IP costs on a quarterly base, but with a very limited level of granularity. There is no chance to report on the global vendor landscape, patent portfolio forecasts, annuity ages of certain patent families, and so forth.

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Roche consulted Yerra Solutions in the search for a better option.

Yerra Solutions understood the lack of flexibility and introduced Yerra Clearly, a hybrid solution that combines technology and human intelligence to manage legal spend. The solution channels every invoice via one centralized inbox which allows the collection, tracking, and analysis of data before approving and forwarding information to each relevant location for payment process. The team then pulls the e-billing information (after aligning the content with needed data) out of the systems on a regular basis in order to generate a complete picture and identify areas for savings. The hybridization of human and artificial intelligence in managing legal spend insures that each step of the process has the appropriate balance of expediency and attention to detail.

As a next step, Karin and her team are creating a database of centralized tariff information, vendor billing guidelines, and introducing (in alignment with procurement) a streamlined invoice submission process. The team can now report on any kind of information, assure the proper approval process, and adapt to new requirements within very short time periods. No current e-billing system offers the same flexibility to leverage data in various systems or the human component that is needed for advanced analytics. It is invaluable to be able to drill down on vendor, patent, cost type, countries, portfolio, business segments, trends etc.

Though this project is still in its implementation stages, there are high hopes that, with Karin’s continued guidance, it will only lead to greater efficiency.

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Change can be hard... unless you have someone focused on making it easy

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Change management is an oft-neglected discipline whose benefit on long-term organizational health cannot be overstated.

Without a person with the dedication and focus to enforce a coherent, success-oriented vision, even the most robust organization can fall victim to a conspiracy of petty inefficiencies.

Vendors need to understand what a business needs and how it works in order to offer products and services that truly provide value, and your business needs a voice in the marketplace.

Don’t let success fool you into complacency—when you need to change the way you do business, appoint an advocate for your organization to oversee internal and external decision making process.

To learn more about how Yerra can help with these challenges, visit www.yerrasolutions.com and contact us today!

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