Change management will allow you to speed up.

In my years across small biotechs, “change management” felt like a luxury we couldn’t afford. The mantra was always speed: “Quick patch before the board meeting,” “Just get the analysis out the door,” “We’ll fix it properly later.”

But here’s what I learned: Emergency patches don’t scale.

When your computational biologist leaves and takes all the tribal knowledge about why that one script has three different output formats… when your “quick fix” becomes the production system that processes clinical trial data… when you’re debugging the same pipeline failure for the fourth time this month…

That’s when you realize change management isn’t bureaucracy. It’s infrastructure.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 “𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁” 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲?

→ Pre-mortems for major releases - 15 minutes asking “What could go wrong?” before pushing to production

→ Change logs that explain why - Not just what changed, but what problem it solved

→ Rollback plans for critical systems - Because 3am is not when you want to figure out deployment dependencies

→ Cross-training documentation - So knowledge doesn’t walk out the door with departing team members

Change management in biotech isn’t about slowing down innovation. It’s about building confidence to move faster.

When your data pipeline has proper testing and rollback procedures, you can actually deploy more frequently. When your analysis scripts have clear documentation, new team members can contribute in weeks instead of months. When you have change logs, debugging becomes archaeology instead of guesswork.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲-𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹: You spend 20% more time on process to save 80% of your time on firefighting.

For small biotechs, the question isn’t whether you can afford to implement change management. It’s whether firefighting is your long-term strategy - especially as you scale, face regulatory scrutiny, or need to onboard new team members quickly.

What’s your experience with balancing speed vs. process in biotech? Have you seen change management approaches that actually accelerated rather than slowed down scientific progress? 🤔