Create projects that support a strategic plan.
“All our projects start with our yearly strategic planning,” Biron explains. Her expansion strategy in the last decade has been to broaden the company’s range of services beyond medical laboratory tests. The new web platform, MyBiron, was designed to make it easier for customers to find and use those services, including laboratory analysis, sleep apnea diagnosis and treatment, and medical imaging. “Biron needs to be multi-disciplinary in nature to be able to address the very wide gamut of needs of patients,” says Françoise Forel, Senior Manager of Commercial Banking at CIBC, who worked with Biron as their Coach through the Best Managed program. “The idea is to reinvent processes to provide an ecosystem of various solutions.”
Listen to your customers’ feedback.
Before embarking on the journey to digitize its services, Biron started by considering how the project would help customers. “We asked ourselves, ‘What do our customers need?’ and we asked customers, through regular requests for feedback.” Their answer? “The information had to be easily accessible and visually attractive, and customers had to be able to track their test results over time.” That’s what MyBiron now provides.
Give managers autonomy.
“Geneviève Biron is not afraid to go out and hire very smart people, even from outside of the medical industry,” Forel says. “She gives her leaders a lot of autonomy.” In the case of the MyBiron site, Biron encouraged her management team to look for technological solutions on their own. “Biron’s managers spent a long time working on the strategic direction that needed to be taken to enable the company’s digital transformation.”
Take time to plan the project properly.
During the first phase of building MyBiron, Biron and her management team realized they had moved ahead too quickly without a solid plan. “Digital transformation is not something you can do overnight,” says Forel. “We hadn’t taken enough time to really define the scale of the project, or decide exactly what it would include, how it would work—in short, the scope of it.” For the second stage of development, Biron divided the program into specific goals for programming, delivery and project management. “We made a much better structure for step-by-step planning, and we are happy with the end result.” Since launching, more than 15,000 customers have registered on the MyBiron site, reinforcing the positive impact of the company’s new approach to strategic planning.
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