These are exciting times to serve the life sciences sector – thanks to technological advances, innovations abound and progress marches on at a lightening-fast clip. Working with a wide variety of organisations, I see two very different types of teams searching for an answer to the same fundamental question: “How do I best do Agile […]
If you’ve ever wandered into a popular juice bar and decided to consume your favorite pressed beverage on-site, you may have noticed a few interesting aspects of the shop’s management that resonate with your role as a quality manager: Juice bars are focused on health, as they provide drinks, smoothies and snacks that are full […]
Over the course of working with dozens of innovative, exceptional companies, I’m always struck by their commonalities of purpose and process. While they all are creating products poised to help us all live happier, healthier and more productive lives, ironically enough many tend to put themselves through sadly torturous, inefficient circumstances before their products can […]
If you need to maintain information for an FDA inspection or submission, Jira is a great tool to use. Be aware, however, that the Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, part 11 requires you to be able to export that data from the system into a readable, precise document: 11.10. (b) The ability to generate accurate […]
Doing Agile in a GXP or medical devices environment requires you to serve two masters: you need to practice the Agile disciplines on one side, and embrace regulatory requirements on the other. In order to strike the balance, you must understand the difference between “stories” (Agile term) and “specifications” (Design Controls term). From my experience […]
Last week a select group of 15 health sector professionals representing businesses from startups to large pharmaceutical companies gathered in Stuttgart, Germany for expert insights on implementing and maintaining effective quality systems. Featuring presentations by four industry leaders, attendees left the conference with actionable information – regardless of if they were initiating a new system […]
For international health industry companies, ensuring regulatory compliance is difficult. Add into the mix an outdated paper-based Quality Management System (QMS), and the task to meet regulatory requirements across multiple locations in an efficient, cost-effective, timely manner becomes impossible – and threatens to derail a busy, successful international organization for non-compliance. The challenge An in […]
Without the right tools in place, traceability matrices can easily bring a project to the brink of collapse. Still today there are project managers who delay moving to production for a significant length of time while they put together a traceability matrix for the validation report. Fortunately, with the addition of appropriate plugins, Jira provides […]
Many of my customers are devoted fans of both Jira and Confluence. They use Jira for tracking their development tasks, defects, and often times some of their business processes. For documenting technical specifications they’ll commonly use Confluence. I am also a fan of both applications, but when it comes to managing requirement specifications within a formal […]
Compliance is a key consideration when using software tools in the context of: Development of software applications which are used for good practice (GxP) purposes Development of software and hardware embedded on medical devices (MedDev). Several standards and guidelines might be applied to the design of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the validation of software, like […]