Can you please give a brief overview of BTG and your role within the company? 

BTG is a global healthcare company focused on Interventional Medicine. BTG’s growing portfolio of Interventional Medicine products is designed to advance the treatment of cancer, vascular conditions and severe emphysema.  Products include innovative medical technology that helps physicians treat their patients through minimally invasive procedures.  BTG’s Pharmaceuticals business provides products that help patients overexposed to certain medications or toxins

At BTG I lead R&D portfolio and project management where we focus on driving project delivery against measurable deliverables without sacrificing quality within a cost constrained environment. By optimizing the project mix we help R&D deliver maximum return on investment to our commercial partners while making a real difference to the patients we ultimately serve. 

Your session will be on a bespoke solution built to accurately project clinical resource requirement, with the help of algorithms. Can you detail the reason why you needed to develop a tailored made tool and what were the principal steps to create and develop it?  
Clinical study volume can vary markedly over time depending on the mix of clinical phase, therapeutic area and the project pipeline. A healthcare company must adequately resource both ongoing studies and also ensure they are appropriately staffed for upcoming studies workload. Therefore it is imperative that the scope of resource requirement is accurate and current across all affected roles and functions.

Functional resource managers are the subject matter experts for resource allocation within their area of expertise, however they do not always have visibility to the latest clinical pipeline projections nor is there consistency across individuals to ensure objective staff modelling. Options exist to facilitate clinical resource projections including software solutions where the customer assigns resource to project activities, however these tools do not flex well with clinical study size and complexity.  Also project management enterprise systems often include algorithm based modelling, but these algorithms are both too generic to be accurate plus also costly to improve.

To overcome these limitations I developed role-specific resource algorithms based on how our employees perform their duties. I worked alongside the resource managers to customize the inputs to mirror our way of working. These algorithms and visual resource outputs were developed within a data visualization platform, Spotfire, which could then consume real-time clinical study data from our project management enterprise system. Therefore the solution is based on accurate and current study inputs and tailor-made resource algorithms providing accurate, company specific clinical resource outputs. 

You highlight the term ACCURATELY which is one of the main challenges in predicting resource or plan/manage multiple projects. How can you reach this accuracy?

The algorithms are developed with the functional resource experts based on how each role performs their work using measures of productivity as the driver of required resources. For example a study manager at company A may start working on clinical studies 6 months before first patient enrolled but the same role in company B may initiate work 4 months prior to this milestone. Company A may measure productivity in number of patients per study manager whereas company B uses sites as this surrogate of productivity. Understanding these inputs from the subject matter experts enables me to develop highly accurate algorithms that drives objective and believable resource requirements that are applicable across all study types. 

What are the main outcomes with the solution?

There are two main benefits to this solution, first the functional resource manager no longer needs to track and project resource requirements, often for multiple out-years and second, hiring of clinical resources can be based on accurate and objective projections ensuring that the company is appropriately resourcing their ongoing and projected clinical portfolio. 

What would you like to achieve by attending the Strategic Project & Portfolio Management for Pharma?

The Pharma space is rapidly evolving, including new paradigms of clinical study research.  How can current system solutions keep pace with this evolution?  I believe we need early adopters (for example within oncology clinical development space) to work with solution developers to ensure that the tools we rely on keep pace with the ever accelerating rate of change within our industry. Conferences like this, will enable those conversations to happen.