Driving Innovation in Life Sciences with Agile Transformation

Adopting an agile development practice could significantly reduce time to deployment while consuming less time, ensuring higher user acceptance, and allowing patients to benefit from new treatments.

FREMONT, CA: Life sciences organizations have begun making the shift to improve efficiency, compliance, and customer experience through agile business transformation. Deploying innovative digital technologies can enhance clinical trial productivity, accelerate research and development (R&D) throughput, accelerate drug development, and ultimately reduce time-to-market. Read on to know more.

Enhanced agility, whether through the adoption of accelerated, technology-driven processes or the ability to release and exploit innovative IT capabilities, fastly is not something firms can achieve overnight. Businesses need to adopt a more iterative and collaborative mindset and culture as they approach new system needs. There are methods to accelerate projects if all of the stakeholders involved are prepared to plan and manage developments in novel ways. Agile software development involves a much closer and more continuous engagement with the IT supplier – including meetings to discuss progress and feedback, suggestions of tweaks to keep the evolving system tightly aligned with the business's latest demands.

In a regulatory information management environment, this regular dialogue will provide an opportunity to feed in the authority guidelines and data standards as these are announced. Since agile development happens as a series, a continuous collaboration makes sure that no part of the project can go too far without reconfirmation that this remains the right course. Another feature of agile development projects is that different aspects of the work can be progressed in parallel. This activity is important because software release models are more fluid in an agile development environment.

While the majority of the direction and synchronization of the agile process will be down to the technology vendor, it is also true that internal IT teams, business sponsors, and user communities will need to be primed to help the agile development process. This needn't take up vast amounts of time. Key representatives are more likely to be involved in stages that are relevant to them. Successful adoption of agile development methods in accelerating project delivery and time to market requires broad buy-in. It is crucial to ensure everyone's proactive involvement and commitment to the agile transformation journey.

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