A Case Study: Agile Pods―A New Way of Doing Promotional Review
Med Communications has many happy clients, and in our series of case studies, we’ll be talking about some of our long-term clients, the challenges we face alongside them, and how we help them be more efficient, increase the quality of their calls and documents, and use the efficiency and the scalability we offer to meet their budgetary needs.
This case study focuses on a large Pharma client who needed support with promotional review deliverables across various therapeutic areas and products.
Read our case study below for more information.
Agile Pods―A New Way of Doing Promotional Review
Integrating Med Communication’s skilled professionals into the Agile promotional review process allowed a client to focus on other strategic business needs.
Background
Client: A large Pharma client needed support with promotional review deliverables across various therapeutic areas and products.
Promotional review is traditionally accomplished by utilizing groups of professionals that meet a few times per week to review promotional assets. It generally takes several weeks to approve an asset.
Challenge
Focus on the promotional review of large sized assets can often lead to the de-prioritization of less complex assets such as email correspondence, banners, brochures, and journal ads.
Solution
The traditional promotional review approach works well when the asset is a large piece such as a core visual aid or a website that requires in-depth discussions involving marketing, legal, regulatory, and medical team members. However, review of less complex pieces, such as banners, emails, and journal ads, can be overlooked in the process. The Agile Pod promotional review process helps ensure these pieces receive the attention they deserve.
An Agile Pod is a small group of people with complementary skills who collaborate to successfully complete a project utilizing the Agile Scrum framework. An Agile Pod for promotional review consists of the same core team members as in traditional promotional review committees, but the way they work together is different.
An Agile Pod works in sprints throughout the year. A sprint is a set length of time (for instance, 3 to 4 weeks) devoted to creating and approving smaller promotional assets. A new sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous sprint.
All the work necessary to achieve asset approval, including review and live meetings, occurs within the designated timeframe. These sprints allow the team to discuss and provide feedback on deliverables during live meetings, which happen a few times per week. Any review or commenting is also done a few hours prior to the live meetings, allowing the discussions to happen at a faster pace than with traditional promotional review. Thus, Agile Pods offer the ability to review and approve pieces in real time.
Med Communications’ team of skilled professionals served as medical reviewers on the client’s Agile Pod team. The client was thus able to continue having larger in-depth discussions on their traditional promotional review teams while our team handled the review, discussion, and approval of less complex assets. Our team was also available to provide traditional review services (Medical and Commercial materials) that were specifically tailored to the client’s unique needs (see our Promotional Review Process page for more information). We collaborated with other core team members to meet business timelines.