Overview: Turning Ambition into Accountability
A top-ten global biopharma company had invested heavily in digital tools across R&D, manufacturing, and IT. The natural next step was creating two things that would ensure ROI: 1) a consistent way to track and measure whether the technology was delivering what it needed to, and 2) the shared ownership to make that measurement meaningful.
North Highland designed a value framework that addressed both at once: bringing financial discipline and shared accountability to a portfolio of more than 200 initiatives. We did this by building a measurement capability with the people responsible for delivering results, not simply for them. The outcome was £30 million in identified value, and an approach the organisation continues to use.
Client Situation: Building Tech with People in Mind
This global biopharma company was executing an ambitious, multi-year programme spanning R&D, manufacturing, and IT, with hundreds of initiatives in flight. The central challenge was finding a shared definition of success for that work that would translate across the organisation.
That goal led to a key discovery: Despite substantial investments in digital tools and platforms, the biopharma company still lacked an operating model that connected those investments to the people, teams, and decision-making structures responsible for realising their value. Technology and talent were being managed as separate workstreams, and the gap between them was where value was being lost.
Without a shared language for value, teams were measuring progress against independently defined metrics. Finance struggled to validate estimates produced without its input, business sponsors could not demonstrate ROI for their initiatives, and senior leadership lacked the visibility needed to make confident prioritisation decisions.
This went beyond simply improving reporting capabilities. The client needed an operating model rigorous enough to earn the confidence of sceptics, scalable enough to span a large and diverse portfolio, and credible enough to give programme leadership a reliable basis for assessing whether its investments were delivering.
Our Approach: Changing How Organisations Make Decisions
As it became clear that the client needed to address a deeper organisational challenge (and not just build a measurement tool), our team recognised that they would not only need to deliver a better model but take a new approach to building one.
Development was iterative and grounded in live use cases rather than theoretical constructs. North Highland worked directly alongside the finance, portfolio, and delivery teams who would own and apply it, pressure-testing assumptions and refining four core value levers (Time Saving, Cost Avoidance, Better Product, and Faster Launch) until they accurately reflected how the organisation defined success. The people who would use the tool helped build it, and that co-design is central to what made the methodology work.
The design was kept deliberately lean. A governance instrument with high overhead tends not to be used, and a tool that sits unused solves nothing. The goal was a model any team could apply without specialist support, while producing outputs that finance could substantiate and defend.
Agreed baseline benchmarks were developed in direct partnership with both portfolio and finance teams. That collaborative approach converted what could have been a point of contention into a foundation of shared ownership, and ensured that when leadership made decisions based on the numbers, the people closest to the work had already confirmed those numbers were right.
Value Delivered: £30M Identified. A New Way of Decision-Making.
Adoption was rapid. Within four months of deployment, the model had been applied to more than 200 initiatives, a rate that reflects both the tool's usability and the confidence the organisation had placed in how it was built.
The model identified more than £30 million in potential value across the portfolio. The significance of that figure extends beyond its size. It represented a shared, finance-endorsed view of programme value at a point when scepticism had been a genuine obstacle to decision-making. Having a credible, consistent number changed the nature of those conversations.
Equally important was what this approach did to the people using it. Teams that had previously operated with separate definitions of success developed a shared vocabulary, one that held up under scrutiny because they had built it together. The technology and the people around it were, for the first time, working from the same page.
With a common view of value established, leadership could assess the full portfolio through a consistent lens, identifying which investments were on track, which required intervention, and where the highest-value work was concentrated. Prioritisation moved from advocacy and intuition to evidence.
The most enduring outcome is the capability North Highland left behind. The model did not depart with the engagement team. Client staff own it, understand it, and continue to apply it as the programme evolves. That is what successful transformation looks like at the intersection of talent and technology: not a tool handed over, but a way of working embedded in how the organisation operates, sustained by the people who helped create it.
READY TO PUT VALUE AT THE CENTRE OF YOUR TRANSFORMATION?
North Highland helps organisations build the measurement capability, shared accountability, and decision-making confidence needed to deliver on complex transformation programmes. If your teams are managing significant investment without a consistent way to measure its value, we can help.
