Pharmacia Office Productivity SolutionAn international IT training project for 60,000 people in over fifty countries
by GLA Management

During 2001 GlobalLearningAlliance provided IT training for the Pharmacia Office Productivity Solution project (POPS) to bring all of Pharmacia’s operations to a common set of desktop applications – worldwide. The project was one of the largest international training projects of its type with around 60,000 people, Pharmacia’s entire global workforce, acquiring new skills to quickly adapt to the new IT system.

Headquarters: New Jersey, USA

Established: 2000

Employees worldwide: 60,000

Markets: therapeutics, consumer healthcare, animal health, fine chemicals and biotechnology.

Pharmacia Corporation is a first-tier global pharmaceutical and life sciences company with an industry-leading growth rate, a robust product portfolio and a high-potential research and development pipeline.

Pharmacia’s core prescription pharmaceuticals business is recognised as an innovative leader in several therapeutic areas including arthritis and inflammation, pain management, antibiotics, oncology and ophthalmology. Pharmacia has a strong position in several related markets, including consumer healthcare, animal health, fine chemicals, global contract manufacturing and diagnostics.

Pharmacia’s agricultural products and plant biotechnology resources offer solutions-driven improvements in farm productivity and reductions in farming costs.

Global thinking

Pharmacia, as with others in the pharmaceuticals sector, already thinks in a global way and has done so for many years: Pharmacia’s brands are sold in most countries; Pharmacia’s research and development activity is organised globally; Pharmacia’s manufacturing and supply chain serves an international demand. Just about everything that is important to Pharmacia is drawn on the ‘world canvas.’

So when it comes to IT, this too has to be organised globally. In April 2000, when today’s Pharmacia organisation was being created from various mergers in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector, Pharmacia found itself with a wide array of IT systems. One of the reasons for the formation of Pharmacia from several individual businesses was to hasten international collaboration across its businesses, creating new market opportunities and the huge, essential efficiencies that further globalisation in the pharmaceuticals sector would provide.

It was apparent to management that it would become critical for Pharmacia’s business units to unify their IT systems – to enable this greater international collaboration throughout the organisation, and accelerate efficiencies and time to market. It is clearly essential for Pharmacia’s 60,000-strong workforce, which needs to work together seamlessly, to be able to share its e-mail, documents and files and all aspects of electronic workflow in the most rapid and expedient fashion. It is also clearly essential for the people collaborating together, wherever it takes place, to share some common IT skills.

Developing skills

With the decision to unify their IT systems and develop the required workforce skills, the Pharmacia Office Productivity Solution (POPS) was established, which would upgrade Pharmacia’s IT operations, worldwide, to a common set of desktop applications – inside twelve months.

Training would be required for Pharmacia’s entire global workforce – some 60,000 people – in over fifty countries worldwide. The POPS project would be ‘mission critical’ – should it fail, Pharmacia’s progress would quickly come to a halt and the enterprise would get bogged down in a vast array of internal communications, information and workflow issues.

About POPS

POPS’ standardised set of applications included Microsoft Office 2000, Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.5, along with Pharmacia’s security and remote access applications. Previously, Pharmacia’s workforce had used Lotus Notes, Lotus cc:Mail and Microsoft Outlook 98 as its workflow and communications applications, and earlier versions of Microsoft Office and other vendors’ software for its documentation and office applications.

Existing IT applications’ skill sets also differed widely across the Pharmacia organisation. Generally, most staff had used other software applications and tools, yet to considerably differing levels. Identifying the new common skill sets and providing the necessary training to bring everyone to a level playing field was critical to optimise global collaboration.

Instructor-led training

One of the first important decisions about the POPS project would be clear. The project’s critical nature defined the need for instructor-led training as opposed to computer-based or other forms of self-paced training. This would demonstrate the importance Pharmacia places on news skills training by providing employees with the personal, on-site expertise needed to help everyone adapt quickly to the new system.

Other factors also determined that the live classroom experience would be the preferred option: management could be sure that all staff had completed training in the shortest possible time; the courses would provide another opportunity to get Pharmacia employees physically together; live courses could be used to communicate other company information.

Key issues

A project on such a large scale would require first class project management. In fact, three international project managers were used on this project – one from Productivity Point International (Andy Held, United States), the lead training provider, based in North America and two from other geographical locations in GlobalLearningAlliance’s network – one covering Europe (Ed Bleij, Netherlands) and one covering Asia Pac (Eric Berry, Australia). Working with Pharmacia’s local-country management, the three project managers managed the training resources, scheduling, reservations, administration and reporting in their particular region.

The training rollout, which commenced in June 2001, followed the IT systems upgrades, moving from one country to the next, with each world region running parallel. The training element of POPS ran over eight months with the project managers working fulltime on the project during this period.

Central management control would be a prerequisite to pull off a project of this magnitude. Yet meeting local needs would require local thinking and local relationships: courseware would be needed in fourteen different languages alone; the cost of providing training differs widely from country to country so there would be implications for budgeting; the length of the training day is different from one country to the next; and then there is the issue of time zones and getting training managers around the world to have discussions with each other at the same time.

As is always the case with large-scale global training initiatives and indeed any initiative involving people from different parts of the world, localisation is an important factor. That’s ensuring that the differences in language, learning culture and economics present in each country are planned for and met.

Productivity Point has been delivering US-based training to Pharmacia for several years. With this initiative, Pharmacia wanted to interface with one company who would be responsible for the entire program on a global basis. Productivity Point, a GlobalLearningAlliance partner, had worked with the alliance on several earlier projects and knew that they were the right global partners to meet Pharmacia’s needs.

Productivity Point would deliver the POPS training project in Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico, where its own operations were sited and manage the relationship with Pharmacia. GlobalLearningAlliance partners would deliver POPS training internationally. In all, training was delivered by forty-five of the alliance’s partners worldwide – the largest single project delivered by the alliance to date.

Pharmacia-specific courseware was developed, covering the different components of the POPS build, that would be used throughout the world by the forty-five different GlobalLearningAlliance training providers engaged in the project – typically one from each country in which training was provided. A POPS training ‘toolbox’ was developed to assist each training provider and Pharmacia’s local-country management to plan and customise the training sessions for their particular sites.

Train-the-trainer sessions were run in the United States, Europe and two in Asia, where the trainers involved from each country learnt about the components of the toolbox to ensure consistency in its use internationally.

The POPS training ‘toolbox’

The training toolbox is a collection of courses, documents, exercises and standard office templates. These made up the basic components of the curriculum – the building blocks through which Pharmacia’s workforce would develop the new skills needed to get maximum usage of their new IT system and standard data, as quickly as possible. The building blocks were used at Pharmacia’s sites to customise the training programme to best meet the needs of the end-users in that particular area.

In the courseware section of the toolbox, there were three ‘core’ modules and thirteen ‘advanced’ modules. These covered the various permutations needed to migrate the workforce from its various existing systems to the new system, and took into account their previous IT experience across the workforce. Additionally, computer-based learning materials were made available to local sites to use in several instances where employees were unable to attend the main courses.

Each module was designed as training room classes, lab-based practical classes and seminar-style lectures – this would give local Pharmacia managers the flexibility to develop their workforce’s skills by the most appropriate method and ensure that the project managers had the necessary armour to ‘throw’ whatever was needed at the project, without ever having to compromise either the budget or the project’s timescales.

International integrated learning solutions

In all training was delivered by forty-five of the alliance’s partners worldwide – the largest single project delivered by the alliance to date. Details of the alliance world-network are available on GlobalLearningAlliance’s Web site at www.GLAworld.com/elearn/map/.

About GlobalLearningAlliance – a new learning partner for a new learning age

GlobalLearningAlliance works with many global enterprises, delivering instructor-led learning and e-learning blended solutions. The alliance contains a world-network of learning companies comprising: IT training providers, on-line learning technologies, custom learning content development services and ‘off-the-shelf’ packaged learning content resources.