Revolutionising Drug Development at
Boehringer Ingelheim -
From Silo Thinking to Network Approach

Andrea has more than 15 years of experience in Lean and Agile methods and more than 25 years in change management and communication.

In the last four years, she serves as Agile Coach in helping to transform a department within the clinical development for human drugs from waterfall approach to Scranban, a combination of Scrum and Kanban. She started to coach a few independent teams and soon developed the idea to run a pilot with the focus to transform a highly complex system of several teams that span different organizational entities who are all dedicated to develop one new drug. She will share her learnings and insights as well as the key success factors and hinderances to watch out for.

Yvonne Ark is a passionate agile coach for over 10 years, working with individuals, teams, and leaders to transform their organizations and ways of working.

At IBM, she guided a team of agile coaches and led an agile transformation, with a focus on non-IT environments. During the Covid pandemic, she participated in the Fellow-Ship program ‘Work4Germany’, where she introduced different ways of working and agile leadership skills in the German Federal Ministry of Finance/Berlin.

Three years ago, Yvonne joined Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company, and has since been working with various clinical development teams within the organization, providing training and coaching in Kanban and Scrum. It became evident that an end-to-end flow of work needed to be created across organizational boundaries. Yvonne joined a small team of self-motivated agile coaches, and together they introduced Kanban across seven teams from different organizations simultaneously, supporting the teams' evolution and introducing flight levels.