Case Study: Life Sciences Company Seeks a Single Quality Global Change Management Process
Abstract
This global biotechnology company sought AAI’s assistance in developing, validating, and implementing a new global change management process for all their information technology needs based on industry best practices, such as ITIL, to streamline their existing business process while simultaneously reducing the number of duplicate processes, increasing control and efficiency and reducing cost.
The Challenge
With 20,000 employees and revenues of more than $12 billion, this worldwide developer, manufacturer and marketer of human therapeutics relies heavily on information technology.
The company’s existing change control systems were multiplying in order to keep pace with the overall growth. Consolidating changes was difficult due to the various and disjointed change control processes and procedures across the enterprise. There was little to no integration into their service desk system to be able to track changes back to an initial problem. The project was chartered to reach decisions about the selection, implementation and operation of a global information system change management process to be supported by a commercial off the shelf application software package (COTS). The company engaged AAI to help validate and implement the new Change Management System supporting the new Change Management Process.
How We Helped
The AAI Consulting team developed a comprehensive validation plan that consolidated expectations of the company’s adopted development methodology, RUP, along with the expectations of a quality computer validation study. This first-of-its-kind artifact introduced the concepts and approaches that today are leveraged throughout the enterprise for all IS projects. AAI guided the project team through all phases of the validation plan and help bridge gaps that arose in the areas of requirements gathering and documentation, design specification creation, user acceptance test planning and execution, performance testing and architecture analysis, and validation test execution.
To help reduce costs while increasing efficiencies and value, AAI employed its reuse and automation model which greatly reduced the amount of time and cost spent reworking test scripts. In addition, AAI’s principle level consultants served as mentors to help strengthen the knowledge and skills of the company’s employees responsible for supporting the system long term.
Lessons Learned
The implementation of a global change management process led to significant improvement in the control of global IS changes across the enterprise. Its universal acceptance was facilitated by a collaborative team style guided by AAI’s principle consultant knowledge of quality, manufacturing and information technology business processes. The company improved their ability to generate comprehensive management reports that equip middle and senior management to focus on strategic oversight and tactical direction.