Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly: The Evista Project

Eli Lilly: The Evista Project

Rady School of Management

La Jolla CA

April 5th, 2011

Rady School of Management

La Jolla CA

April 5th, 2011

Tom Nuth

Mat Klein

The operational realities of heavyweight development teams and their transition following product launch

Tom Nuth

Mat Klein

The operational realities of heavyweight development teams and their transition following product launch

1. A heavyweight project team has a heavyweight team structure. The manager of a heavyweight team has direct access to top management, and is responsible for the work of everybody involved in the project. He/she has clout, experience, influence, and dedication of core members. Heavyweight teams are especially good at developing next-generation components or products. A heavyweight project team, the project leader is a team leader and there is functional representation provided be team members who are on the project full-time. The team leader (TL) has access to resources and control of tasks (for example, reallocating resources to tasks and prioritization of tasks) and all of the team members report to him/her (TL).

The key characteristics that defined a heavyweight team at Lilly are 1) They had a clear business charter to focus on the development of a single compound 2) Each team was co-located and cross-functional 3) The teams were led by a heavyweight project manager 4) Each team took responsibility for the substance of the work and how it was accomplished and the ensuing results 5) They had explicitly detailed timelines and deliverables defined.

The traditional functional-based teams at Eli Lilly adopted slow and cautious approach for product development with no proper tracking of resources, accountability or focus. With the introduction of “heavyweight” teams the product development at Eli Lilly was sped up by developing innovative methods to gather information, develop large clinical trials to answer many questions,...