Connectivity Interacting, Collaborating, and Networking

Meet Mary Mary became a PharmaCom Project Manager this week after spending 6 years in Basic Research. She will be working with her team to determine if their drug candidate is viable. She has been learning how to navigate the rest of the PRL community outside of the labs and is beginning to get the hang of things.

Because she is at a different site, Mary remotely learns the procedures and operations of her job from her manager, Melanie.

Meet Melanie Melanie has been a PharmaCom Project Manager for nearly 20 years and has contacts in every area of PRL. She wishes she could spend more time mentoring new hires like Mary, but with her busy schedule she winds up being more of a reference than a coach.

Knowing how important networking is at PharmaCom, Melanie encourages Mary to connect with her colleagues and gain a better understanding of who they are, their role on the project, and most importantly, what they are passionate about.

Colleagues at Lunch

Taking Melanie’s advice, Mary reads most of the documentation from the project teamspace and does research on her teammates using internal PharmaCom resources prior to her first meeting with them.

She also checks out some of the papers they have written and becomes familiar with their interests and areas of expertise.

Although she has not personally met them, Mary feels that she is now acquainted with her colleagues.

Even though the prep work helped Mary learn more about her teammates on an individual level, it didn’t prepare her for the complex dynamics of working with a team spread out over multiple work sites.

In her first project meeting, Mary is introduced to the team. Most of the attendees are teleconferencing in from other sites around the world.

Because it is difficult for her to tell how everyone is reacting to the discussion, she often finds herself interrupting and speaking over people.

She also feels that only a small portion of the attendees are openly contributing to the meeting.

As she feared, a few attendees reach out afterwards to further discuss agenda items that were either closed or tabled for sub-team review.

For the next meeting, Mary decides to set up a video conference as a way of avoiding some of the awkwardness of the last meeting. This way, everyone can see each other and have a more open conversation.

During the meeting, a question is brought up about the quantitative PCR of a particular sodium molecule with liver cells that no one can answer – including Thomas.

Meet Thomas Thomas is a Senior Lab Chemist in PRL's Basic Research division. He's been with PharmaCom for 20 years and identifies with the company values of knowledge and peer contacts. Although some of that time was spent abroad in the US, he recently returned back to his hometown of Hoddesdon in the UK.

To avoid interrupting the discussion taking place, Mary uses the meeting chat tool to ask Thomas if he has any ideas around who might have the answer.

Based on Thomas’s response, Mary makes a note to post the team’s question to PharmaCom’s Q&A board. She is confident that between this and her list of knowledge profiles for liver cell biologists, she will soon have an answer.

As the meeting winds down, Mary observes that things seemed to run more smoothly. More people actively participated in the discussion and it was easier to interpret reactions to challenging topics thanks to being able to see facial reactions and body language.

To see what everyone else thinks, Mary does a pulse check and is pleased to see that the new format got a thumbs up from most attendees. She is also pleased to see that her inbox has not been inundated with “off-line” follow-ups to decisions from the meeting.

Sub-teams post their off-line discussions to the team wiki and voting tools are used to make decisions between meetings. Most importantly, all meetings are immediately uploaded to the project teamspace for those who couldn’t make the meeting live.

Thanks to fewer email follow-ups, Mary has time to post the team’s question to PharmaCom’s Q&A tool immediately following the meeting. She quickly starts receiving answers back – not only from PRL colleagues, but from some of their research partner colleagues as well.

She enters search keywords such as, “liver”, “cellular biology”, and “sodium + qPCR” to narrow down the list of responses and notices that a great deal of the remaining answers are from Andrew Cai, a scientist from one of PharmaCom’s research partners.

Meet Andrew Andrew joined the PRL team 2 years ago as a research partner and is considered by many to be an up and coming thought leader in liver cell biology. He is excited to be working with PharmaCom because of its dedication to research and has already made many connections in the PRL community.

In Andrew's profile, Mary sees that several people have rated him favorably for answering their questions quickly and efficiently.

When Thomas hears about Andrew, he is skeptical. He has never met Andrew and knows little about who he is beyond the fact that Mary found him on some “website”.

However, going through his own network, Thomas learns that Andrew was a graduate student of his old professor at Brown. Thomas also learns that his colleagues like working with Andrew because he always makes sure his data is relevant by referencing the PharmaCom databases before submitting his response.

Hearing approval from some trusted members of his network, Thomas feels more comfortable with Andrew’s response.

Now in direct contact with one another, Thomas and Andrew collaborate virtually on some molecular structures by drawing them out to avoid naming mishaps.

As Thomas and Andrew finish up their collaboration, a Safety Assessment and Pre-Clinical sub-team begins to look more closely at the drug candidate to better understand the compound toxicity.

With each member as an author, the Safety Assessment and Pre-Clinical sub-team iterates on their report for the committee reviews.

At the end of the Development Phase, Mary and the Clinical Research Associate use the Teamspace to coordinate the IND application. They reference the meeting recordings and sub-team wikis as project support.

Later, when the project moves into Phase I testing, the Data Manager, Robert, sets up a reporting environment for Mary.

Meet Robert Although he is relatively new to PharmaCom and PRL having only joined 2 years ago, he has been in the area of Clinical Operations for 9 years. His detail-oriented personality and flexible demeanor is an asset as he coordinates sites around the country and implements clinical trials.

In the reporting environment, site investigators enter their results as soon as they have them. Mary and Robert log into the environment to see the data.

Mary subscribes to the environment so that she receives batch updates of Robert's clinical reports and operational plans.

If the project has an issue, Mary knows immediately and can make adjustments before it becomes a problem.

Overall, the different voices of the research lifecycle came together seamlessly with the help of different types of collaboration tools to help foster creativity and accelerate innovation.

Decision times were condensed, information was accessed regardless of time or location, and a team that never met in person worked as if they had known each other for years and were seated right next to one another.