Eli Lilly: The Elvista Project Essay Example

they were in charge of all ongoing aspects of the project.

This led to the development of a “system solution”, rather than functional groups focusing on a certain end state. Heavyweight Teams should be deployed in Phase III through the FDA approval process. These phases include many complicated and critical tasks. In order to complete these tasks in a timely manner with high quality, it would be very wise to implement a Heavy Weight team here. Any mistakes can then be fixed quickly and all tasks can be completed on time. Phase III takes 3 years and involves 1000-3000 patient volunteers to monitor adverse reactions to long term use. FDA Review takes 2-3 years and involves hundreds of thousands of pages of applications and write ups that are included in the New Drug Application.

3. Is the "heavyweight" project teams an approach that you would recommend to Lilly for commercialization of the Evista product? What additional recommendations would you make to Lilly management concerning the use of heavyweight teams going forward? At this time I don’t think Evista should look into expanding heavyweight project teams across commercialization. As of right now, there is turmoil within the company because they believe the heavyweight project teams have access to an excessive amount of resources. Bringing in another heavyweight project team for commercialization will possibly escalate that turmoil.

At the same time, the use of heavyweight project teams for commercialization will bring more product expertise towards the end of line where the sale is made. If Evista integrated its sales team within its development team, they could reduce the amount of time it takes to

transfer information. My suggestion to Evista would be to start small if they were thinking about implementing a heavyweight project team for commercialization. Possibly start by bringing some of the marketing team down into development, and then they can relay the message to the rest of marketing. As of right now Lilly has very limited man power, so this will put pressure on their labor force and continue to hurt their other ongoing projects. If Lilly were to implement a heavyweight project team, their R&D and marketing spending would have to increase to compensate for the allocation of labor.