“I am looking for people who dare to dream, not for people that will explain what cannot be done.”
—Jack Knott, Former E-Pack Digital Printing CEO
Not too long before the COVID-19 pandemic broke loose, early 2020, I got a phone call from the Vice President of R&D of a biochemical startup company. He explained that the purpose of the company was to develop (and spearhead the development of) the next generation fast-charging batteries for electric cars. While striving for that, they discovered that their development cycles were much too slow. They were looking for a way to accelerate their development while leaving the option of switching to development alternatives based on updated or future research. They contacted me because they felt Scrum could help them increase their agility to the level they were looking for.
I admit that I seriously doubted about accepting the challenge. My experience was mostly in using Scrum in software development teams and organizations, not in battery development where molecular formulas replace lines of code and anodes and cathodes are some of the artifacts. I also doubted whether the Scrum framework would be suited, or could potentially be tweaked, for use in this part of the biotech industry. And the last question going through my mind was about the people I was going to have to coach and support. They were highly skilled Biotech professionals holding PhDs in domains like chemistry having worked on projects that typically took several years. How was I going to help them shift to working in short, fast-paced iterations while creating increments of work?
Despite my doubts, I decided to go for the challenge anyhow. Step by step we kept progressing. Change comes in increments too, you know? Ultimately, we ended up with all people involved working in cross-functional Scrum Teams while maintaining very high levels of transparency and openness. It allowed leadership and the teams to take unexpected and unanticipated decisions during development. Looking back, this was absolutely crucial to successfully develop a new and innovative battery product. And three years later, the startup company successfully created their fast-charging battery, thereby successfully achieving their first major goal. Their next big step is a commercial release.
Since then, I have worked with several other companies in the Biotech industry. It allowed me to better grasp the uniqueness of Agile transformations in this part of the industry that I want to share.
I have identified four important differences between applying Agile in the software industry and in the biotech industry:
- Complexity: While software development is complex, development upon sciences tends to be somewhat chaotic. And while launching a new software startup company is pretty feasible (but with little certainty about its commercial success), an innovative new scientific product is very likely to sell but organizing for its development and actually building it holds a lot more profound difficulties and complexities.
- Familiarity: Needless to say, but Agile and Scrum are very well known in the software industry. Their adoption and application in the biotech industry are very green field. On the one hand, this might be an obstacle for their adoption. On the other hand, it avoids prejudices and examples of failures from resisting the adoption.
- Done: It is a lot more straightforward to define what it means for a software product version to be “Done” (usable, releasable) than it is in biotech research and product development.
- Developers: It is not easy but there are ways in a software development environment to use Scrum to find the right combination of “building the right thing” and “building the thing right”. I found that achieving this balance was a lot harder for academic researchers who often consider “building the thing right” as the only valid option, thereby implicitly ignoring the business aspect of the environment in which they worked.
I found that the practices that contributed most to the successful adoption of Agile and Scrum in the biotech industry were: cross-functional, self-managed teams and the Sprint Review.
Although in the medical world, everyone would agree that a patient should be considered holistically, in practice doctors and other medical professionals often have a hard time transcending their specific specialization, let alone work as a team with different specialists. This was no different in the biotech companies where I engaged. The teams mostly included people from the exact same field of expertise and were led by the chief scientist of that field. Transforming such team structures and the underlying organizational structures and beliefs was pretty difficult.
Scientists are mostly used to working individually while pushing their boundaries to expand their knowledge. I encountered a lot of resistance inviting them to collaborate with people from a very different field of expertise as a team, with the goal of building on collective intelligence and striving for shared goals. On top of that, there were these chief scientists who had to shift from making decisions for these individual scientists toward professionally supporting and advising a multi-disciplinary team. The envisioned evolution towards establishing cross-functional, self-managed teams eventually did successfully happen. This success was also demonstrated in the drastically increased transparency regarding not only the progress of the product development as a whole. It also made it easier to decide and revise decisions regarding priority and even change direction. And, not in the least, there was a remarkable increase in commitment and engagement of the team members. They felt much more respected for the huge impact they all had on the future of the product they took part in developing.
In general and according to the official descriptions, Sprint Reviews should truly be opportunities for inspection and adaptation; regarding the product, the value it provides, the goals and direction of the future development. Unfortunately, too many organizations in the software industry mistake and limit the Sprint Review to a demo meeting; within the team, from the team to the Product Owner, often with no more than a few stakeholders. My experience in biotech was very different, probably not in the least because of the green field situation of introducing Scrum. Our Sprint Reviews typically included very critical stakeholders which lead to spirited discussions and exchange of ideas. Although our Sprint Reviews therefore took quite some time and were experienced as exhausting, they also generally left people in a state of excitement and high energy. Progress was demonstrated through the achieved Sprint outcomes (often experiment results) as a basis for deep discussions around next steps. The outcome of the Sprint Reviews, captured in an updated Product Backlog, were important sources of inspiration for the teams in the Sprint Planning of the next Sprint.
Having had the privilege to work with several organizations in the biotech industry is that the success of an Agile transformation will be much influenced by unleashing the engagement and motivation of the people involved and striving for total transparency to enable smarter decision making along the way. In my experience, the impact of the support, belief and courage of senior management cannot be underestimated. Their actual involvement and determination are crucial in paving the path to increased agility with determination. It includes driving forward tough decisions that impact highly skilled people, involving HR in the transformation and being great managers, more than acting as domain experts.