Creating a Lean R&D System

115

7

Removing Barriers within

the R&D Community

Communities are groups of people that work together toward a common

purpose. eir ability to do so, of course, depends on how strongly they

see their common purpose, and how eectively they can coordinate their

resources against that common purpose. In more than 100 improvement

projects within corporate research and development (R&D), some things

have emerged in the study of groups in their ability to overcome technical

and scientic hurdles over years of eort that, if we are lucky, will yield a

new pharmaceutical treatment.

e rst is that the majority (sometimes the vast majority) of work

that a research community performs is not directed toward achieve-

ment of its goals. Instead, a large amount of the time researchers,

managers, and support sta spend are in support of the system under

which the community operates. Colleagues do work required of them

by computers, forms, and facilities. Colleagues do work required to sat-

isfy interfaces between functions, and colleagues do work required by

management systems, ranging from project reviews to planning eorts

to human resources activities. Even a casual observer will note the

amount of time that a project team spends serving the broader sys-

tem, rather than the scientic work of creation and integration of new

knowledge, is quite large. So, let’s break down a few examples and show

how it looks.

116 • Creating a Lean R&D System

NONINNOVATION WORK

Supporting Basic Work Requirements

In R&D, a basic requirement of every scientist is to document his or her

work. She designs an experiment, runs the experiment, checks results

against her hypothesis, and then enters it into some sort of record-keeping

device. ese can be as simple as log books or as complicated as “elec-

tronic notebook” systems that substitute for log books, but store informa-

tion electronically.

In the course of work, materials must oen be purchased. In order to

do so, the scientist must ll out a form or enter data into a computer

system, which then is processed and, at some point in the future, is con-

verted into delivered materials to begin work. In other instances, mate-

rials must be machined, and an order must go to a machine shop to

perform the work.

ese are obvious work requirements, but we can make these activities

easy or onerous, and the activities, in themselves, serve nothing but the

underlying systems that use or store their data. Forms can be easy or dif-

cult to ll out, and it may even prove that no form is necessary at all, but

in the end, minutes and hours every day are spent serving these activities.

Supporting Interfaces

One vice president suggested that 80 percent of all knowledge is lost as soon

as it crosses an interface to another group. I cannot even begin to know if

that number is right, but consider that there are people who develop for-

mulations, recipes if you will, for the making of something. In the chemi-

cal industry, there are formulas for glue, for plastic parts, for explosives

and drilling slurries. In the pharmaceutical industry, there are formulas

for ointments, creams, tablets, and so on. Each of these is created by some-

one steeped in the understanding of ingredients and their combinations.

e person who actually compounds the materials together, that is, the

person who mixes the ingredients and puts them through an extruder, a

mixing tank, a tablet press or what have you, are typically unskilled in the

understanding of formulation. eir job is to make the stu, not to design

what stu it is to be made.