PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY | EXAMPLES | WORK EXPERIENCE | CREATIVE

DISTRESSED PROJECT COURSE-CORRECTION EXAMPLE

ALLERGAN EMAIL MARKETING PRODUCT | 2023

Program Brief

• Situation
• As part of the Allē platform, a growing suite of Consumer- and Provider-oriented marketing and promotional tools, Allergan Aesthetics sought to develop an email marketing platform to service ~30,000 Providers
• The project suffered from conflicting expectations from stakeholders and a lack of centralized project leadership; timeline expectations were inconsistent and project goals shifted frequently
• I was hired to directly helm the project already in-flight and bring a guiding hand, direction, and rigor for delivery
• A small Proof Of Concept had been released for 150 Providers, and a pilot program for ~4000 Providers was well into development and seen by executive leadership as behind schedule
• Task
• Assess the current state of the project; project plan, delivery status, reporting framework, expectation alignment with leadership
• Understand the reality on the ground and pair that against the perception and expectation of leadership
• Build in a proper project framework and update the project plan accordingly to reflect realistic delivery timelines; reconcile this against current Marketing expectations and messaging
• Get project teams unified and moving forward, keeping the project on track
• Actions
• Hosted several meetings seeking better understanding, including sessions with executive leadership, previous project oversight, and current project delivery teams
• Rebuilt the project plan based on a better understanding of delivery realities, the goal to reset expectations with stakeholders and leadership
• Coordinated closely with Marketing to understand their messaging timing and promises already made to the Providers who were expecting to have access to this new tool
• Revised timelines along the way as new obstacles presented themselves, specifically an unforeseen technical misstep requiring months of migrating off one backend tool to another
• Coordinated directly with the QA/Validation team to better coordinate on timing needs in order to meet launch dates with confidence
• Result
• Delivered the pilot and the full wide-scale launch on time per the revised project plan timelines
• These were both among the smoothest launches I've ever had, neither requiring any emergency hotfixes or fast-follow adjustments due to post-launch production hiccups
• Despite strong coordination with Marketing for the rollout to 30,000 Providers, overall adoption was initially slow
• Initial user adoption was lower than expected at first, yet those that did saw measurable returns in lead followup, new clients, and returning clients (~10% improvement)
• The product was deemed a success, and user adoption did increase over time to reach anticipated levels

Business Impact

• Adding email marketing capability to the Provider platform increased its utility to clinics and further improved Allergan's market differentiation
• Providers opting to utilize the new platform saw measurable benefit (~10% improvement) to their client generation and retention efforts, which in turn translated to increased business for Allergan Aesthetics

Approach

• Understand the project's distress from the executive leadership perspective
• Understand the challenges and misalignments from the delivery teams' perspectives
• Rebuild the project plan from the ground up
• Reconcile as best as possible these perspectives against the new, hardened project plan

Communication and Reporting

• Published regular status reports per Allergan's PMO standard
• Met intermittently directly with leadership to discuss progress and risks

Challenges

• Dedicated resources for this effort were untenably thin for several months
• Delivery of the 4000 Provider pilot was already scheduled for delivery within my first 90 days while I was still getting up to speed
• Wide scale onboarding was initially anticipated within 8-12 weeks following the pilot, this was postponed by six months due to an unexpected technical tooling issue (we experienced severe throttling of email sends as we approached 4000 Providers in the system, a more scalable tool was needed)
• Executive leadership remained fractured in its expectation of goals and timing
• Stakeholders often avoided standard reporting channels in favor of back-channel updates outside of the PMO
• Specific leaders rejected due diligence from the ground teams in favor of their own gut sense of what was needed and how long it should take to deliver

Key Learnings

• Following TPM best practices and building solid project plans are not guarantees that stakeholders will buy in and accept the information and reporting they are given
• Providing all of the facts clearly and dispassionately does not necessarily result in the removal of others' personal biases or unreseached opinions; data does not always win the day

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