Change Control and Veeva Commercial Cloud

To maintain business flexibility and a positive user experience over time, every business needs a smart approach to change control. On one hand, over-inflated processes limit the responsiveness needed to quickly react to change. On the other, a lack of formal procedures can lead to poor user adoption because a system that changes too frequently or too drastically can inhibit user satisfaction.

Establishing a formal procedure to make changes to Veeva Commercial Cloud helps ensure the business gains maximum value from its investment. For example, making sure systems can talk to each other across technologies is an important key to efficiency. For vital processes to continue to function after any configuration changes, it’s crucial to consider integration concerns along with any changes to Veeva.

Creating strong, detailed rules and policies to govern change control helps avoid the risk of excessive flexibility, which could lead to an inconsistent user experience. Additionally, robust change control policies ensure users aren’t hampered by narrow or limited-use configuration. Change control ensures all requests are properly evaluated and have long-term viability prior to release.

However, too frequently, change control takes on a life of its own, putting process and documentation itself above the goal of maintaining a healthy and responsive CRM system. A change control process that demands exponentially more time and resources than is required to make the actual change is counter-productive. A cumbersome process can deter users from making valuable system change requests—just to avoid the headache of the change control process. Processes that require multiple layers of administration may lead to approvals by individuals who do not have working knowledge of how the requested changes may impact the system as a whole. At worst, over-engineered change control policies can hinder the speed of Veeva Commercial Cloud by reinforcing legacy processes Veeva Commercial Cloud was meant to replace.

By bringing change control into the cloud for greater visibility and better process management, Veeva CRM can help ease the pain of change control. Managing this process in the cloud eliminates the need to download and locally save information to revise change control documentation, provides real-time update capability and ensures requests are accessible throughout the change control process. Veeva CRM can be enabled with the PMO Toolkit during any Services or Managed Services engagement. This toolkit allows companies to easily centralize user requirements or system enhancement requests in a single location—enabling easy tracking and planning of releases. Teams can create, update, and track improvement projects in the cloud— removing the burden of resource-intensive change control procedures that simply add manual labor. Striking the right balance between process control and flexibility will help companies appropriately manage change—and ultimately, create a strong foundation for their commercial operations with Veeva Commercial Cloud.