When everything has to happen at once

The executive leadership team of a biotech organisation had secured board approval for a major capital investment in a complex GMP facility. The facility would not open for several years - yet the decisions made now would determine whether the organisation was ready to operate at scale when the doors finally opened, and whether board confidence in the team's ability to deliver could be sustained.

The organisation faced a dilemma: It had to build the organisation and sell its services before the facility existed to deliver them. Construction, commercial pipeline development, hiring, and operational readiness were all running in parallel – each with hard sequencing dependencies and little room to recover from mistiming.

There was no integrated view of how these workstreams connected. In cell therapy, where customer lead times routinely exceed a year, this gap carried concrete commercial risk: Arrive at launch without a pipeline and the facility opens underutilised.

Strategic positioning added further complication. The executive team was reluctant to rule out opportunities in a rapidly evolving market – understandable, but risky. Broad positioning meant diffuse capability investment, unclear hiring profiles, and a commercial story that was hard to land with early customers who needed specificity before they would commit.

Without a clear organisational development plan (ODP), the organisation risked arriving at launch having built the wrong organisation for the strategy.

We began with a two-day facilitated offsite for the full executive leadership team, designed to surface misaligned assumptions, establish shared priorities, and define the design principles that would govern the ODP.

Over the following weeks, we detailed the foundation for the ODP across two workstreams. We ran focused working sessions with internal stakeholders to map dependencies and operational constraints that executive-level planning tends to miss. In parallel, we benchmarked international peer CDMOs, speaking directly with leaders who had navigated comparable ramp-ups, to pressure-test our assumptions.

We consolidated all inputs into a four-year organisational development plan with activity sequencing, milestones, and initiative briefs. To ensure organisational anchoring and disciplined execution, we developed supporting governance and facilitation tools.