Generative AI has burst onto the scene, appearing fast and evolving even faster, proving that it is here to stay. For forward-thinking companies with leadership who understand the impact Gen AI can have, the potential rests on leaders’ willingness to lead and learn differently in search of opportunities to reinvent work so the workforce can focus on innovative breakthroughs that require critical human thinking.
In that vein, leadership at a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company laid out a daunting and ambitious multi-year challenge for its departments: conduct more than 20 experiments across the organization to see how Gen AI could be leveraged to increase productivity and efficiency in order to realize a billion dollars in savings per year, freeing up valuable time for teams to pursue breakthroughs that change patients' lives.
The company was embarking on a significant undertaking to enhance innovation and operational efficiency–and needed a roadmap to make it a reality.
Company leadership recognized the need for a unified value realization strategy, one where colleagues would understand how AI experiments with unclear value would contribute to the achievement of organizational goals. Desired outcomes were articulated yet somewhat abstract at the outset, including reducing spending on external resources, saving time on projects, increased efficiency, and ultimately, more innovative breakthroughs due to devoting less time to tasks and more time to big projects. The vision was there, but it needed to be paired with a framework that turned the plan into trackable goals.
The company partnered with McChrystal Group, and we identified an opportunity to pair this audacious vision to leverage Artificial Intelligence with a simple, repeatable goals management process. Enter Microsoft Viva Goals, a platform organizations can use to implement the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) Framework in their digital work environment. This methodology relies on goals (or objectives) and results in aligning around a vision, expanding transparency, and increasing daily discipline around measuring work. Viva Goals is designed to help a company define its main strategic objectives and establish the key results that teams and individuals need to achieve to realize them, coordinating their activities to ensure they fall in line.
Approach
Together, goals or objectives and the ensuing key results transform a corporate vision into an actionable and measurable approach that brings together various departments, teams, and individuals to achieve one plan. Microsoft Viva Goals serves to centralize the tracking and management of them, avoiding the common pitfalls of planning and measuring strategies through various PowerPoint and Excel documents, which too often leave everyone unclear on what the latest version of the document is with too few tangible metrics.
Working directly with the team tasked with realizing the value of the internal AI initiative, we first recognized that the team was already engaging in what they thought was goal setting but was actually simply metric tracking without the discipline needed to drive meaningful change. The lack of a structured approach hindered progress and efficiency.
Starting from a blank slate, we worked collaboratively with the team to calculate baseline metrics to track tangible targets against the objectives themselves. This allowed the group to align the key results with the objective and then input them into Viva Goals to increase transparency using the baseline metrics as a guiding force.
McChrystal Group led several workshops with the value realization team to introduce and implement OKRs and Viva Goals, guiding them through writing OKRs for the first time and using the Viva Goals tool effectively while also creating the habit of regularly updating Viva Goals so all could track progress. From there, we provided ongoing support in the form of sessions for individualized support to help with items such as OKR refining, entry, tracking, and review processes in Viva Goals, as well as technical support such as data source integrations to automate the process, data mapping to visualize progress, and general troubleshooting.
The change in culture was also a key part of ensuring this project was successful. Previously, these goals and progress to achieve them were tracked in silos. After targeted sessions focused on explaining the why behind transparency with goal tracking, there is more compliance associated with updating, and anyone within the organization can see any team's progress in real-time.
Results
The company’s embrace of effective goal setting and tracking showcases the transformative power of the OKR process. By partnering with McChrystal Group, the company not only enhanced the effectiveness of its product teams but also gained a competitive edge in implementing generative AI.
Teams are now saving time, energy, and organizational capacity by moving the project tracking and review process from PowerPoint slides and manual updates to a centralized, comprehensive platform with options for automatic and manual updating.
This collaborative endeavor resulted in the following outcomes for the value realization team tasked with leveraging AI to save the company money and increase productivity:
Across 16 use cases that rolled out in Q1, more than 1,500 users have been onboarded with 1,500 more expected in the coming year
By the end of Q2, it is estimated that the use cases will save $150+ million
Hundreds of hours saved on goal tracking and workflow management through data automation
Vertical and horizontal transparency in goal setting
Strategic alignment and role clarity across dozens of teams and functions
With the initial success of the AI initiative, the effort has since gone beyond the pilot phase; it's now spreading into new corners of the organization, helping teams of all sizes and varying roles unlock even greater efficiencies, saving time, cutting costs, and blazing a trail of innovation in the pharma landscape.
In harnessing the power of disciplined goal alignment and strategic technology adoption, our partnership not only elevated productivity but also positioned the company at the forefront of generative AI implementation. Together, we turned vision into reality, laying the foundation for a future defined by innovation and success.
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