6. Doing more with less; services & teams. Simple Solutions for Busy Managers.

Face the facts: Doing the right things

If you have to face the facts and cut back, here's 6 strategies that can make a difference.

1. Right services
Everything you do should be to satisfy a customer & bring value to your company. Do you have the right balance between reactive services (e.g.answering enquiries) and proactive services (e.g promotional review, developing FAQS or website copy)?

If you had to set up your service from scratch, what would you offer & what processes would you put in place?

If might look very different from your existing situation.

2 Gold, silver or bronze service
Medical Information attracts altruistic perfectionists. But efficiency means knowing when to stop. Compromising on quality is also difficult for us. We probably offer a gold standard service for every enquiry, regardless of its urgency, importance or difficulty.

When resources are tight, you need to prioritise. Deadlines may be more flexible than you think. During a busy launch, my team could only clear the urgent or easy questions, creating a backlog. Enquiry workload analysis revealed 50% of enquiries were on time, 25% early but 25% were late. Complaints were inevitable. We reprioritised to focus on urgent, important enquiries leading to less late answers and faster replies.

Result = happy customers + happy team.

3. Right customers or brands
Many companies now outsource less urgent and important work to external providers or suppliers. Typical examples include support to mature (off-patent) brands, updating standard responses, or producing literature alerts.

4. Right team

When a team works well together, it's like heaven. When there is friction, it's like hell. Like a car with faulty engine, if it's not running smoothly, you'll get poor performance and increased consumption. Optimising team working is your most important job as the manager. Here are some critical questions about your team;
~ Does everyone have clear roles and know their boundaries?
~ Can we successfully resolve conflict between people?
~ Are we exploiting our strengths and focusing on getting the job done?
~ Am I managing my team's talents by delegating projects, encouraging and motivating my people and developing their skills in critical areas?
~ Have I got a good balance between specialists and generalists in my team? Successful teams have a diversity of skills, capabilities and knowledge. Corporate clones have little flexibility.

5. Think global
Collaborating with your Medical Information colleagues in other countries is the key to survival when times get tough. It can be as simple as sharing standard responses to the more complex situation of virtual medical information brand teams across a region or a Pan European call centre. When we share a common European licence, it can make good sense. More companies now collaborate regionally than they did 5 years ago.

It's not always easy as it sounds. Having worked with global teams where you have no direct responsibility, I learnt that you need a flexible management style, draw on expertise wherever you find it and be sensitive to cultural nuances.

6. Right processes
As part of a company merger, we had to come up with a common way of working. We wanted to take the best from the 2 companies as well as bringing in best practice from outside. We analysed all our business processes and outcomes to rebuild the new teams based on need. It was a mammoth project but it meant that we had a firm foundation to provide excellent customer service.

Six Sigma is a quality improvement method that more companies are introducing into medical communications. It promises to boost productivity, cut costs and avoid duplication. At the heart of Six Sigma, is the concept of eliminating rework - redoing part of a job or having to do extra as it wasn't right first time. Want to know more?

Click here for more details.

This is just 6 strategies which may inspire you to think of other ways you can work with your teams to meet today's challenging targets.