There are many ways to make your life science product development more productive, but these can sometimes be short-term or surface fixes. There are far deeper and more ingrained organizational issues that must be tackled in order to push your company’s productivity further. Beyond compliance or development planning, there are important initiatives your business needs to address that can change how your organization behaves in favor of greater productivity.
While there’s no definitive approach to minimize multitasking, there are a few avenues to explore. Dividing work up more thoroughly and clustering similar tasks together can be an effective solution, for example. In addition, if there are opportunities to bring in new team members or adjust existing teams to parcel out tasks even further, then your organization can take that approach. It’s easy to go overboard with streamlining work, however, so appropriate plans need to be in place.
Deliberately making space for breaks—and encouraging them—can improve productivity. This is for both the everyday work and the overall project timeline. Breaks for physical exercise, even something as simple as getting up and walking around, have been demonstrated to improve memory and attention. They also fight off mental and physical fatigue, which can decrease errors and other issues that could impact product quality.
Meetings don’t have to be gutted from your organization’s activities completely, but finding ways to make them more efficient and time-sensitive can go a long way. Whether that means establishing clear agendas, implementing rules for dealing with off-topic discussions, or determining meeting topics that can be done in a quick stand-up session, getting a grip on meetings requires thorough planning and foresight.
Your development teams can only do so much by hand. Because efficiency and quality are so intertwined in life science product development, giving your personnel the means to satisfy both these concerns involves working with any number of tools. The right product development tools, for example, can mean the difference between getting to market on time and pushing project timelines back. But knowing what to pick and how to incorporate it into your existing activities is a challenge that needs to be navigated.
All of these organizational changes are not easy, but many are necessary for long-term growth. Moving past the day-to-day challenges to keep your company growing high-quality, safe and effective life science products needs to be a priority. Otherwise, you may continue to struggle across the board, from delayed development timelines to losses of revenue.