The Four-Month Operational Buildout:
end-to-end workflow design
cross-functional coordination
rapid operational standup
I was brought in to implement a new support role for a rare disease treatment program, but the client had only a high-level concept with no operational plan for how it would work.
My role was to translate that vision into a functioning service model and get it up and running within four months by defining new workflows, coordinating six cross-functional teams, and building the infrastructure within their CRM to support operations.
The Problem
My client, the director of a program that supported patients with a highly rare hereditary disease, wanted to introduce a new medical social worker role to provide patients with personalized education and support prior to and after starting treatment. The treatment was a once-monthly infusion with strong retention rates, but the client recognized a gap: many individuals were prescribed based solely on lab results without fully understanding their disease or how this treatment would help them. With a competitor product in the pipeline offering a more convenient delivery method, the client wanted to differentiate through a superior support experience.
The vision was clear: medical social workers would visit individuals early in their treatment journey to educate them about their condition and help resolve non-insurance barriers to care. But the operational reality was completely undefined. The existing program was entirely outsourced to a hub vendor handling benefits investigation, scheduling, and adherence calls. How would this new role integrate with existing workflows? What would handoffs look like? What could the new role legally say or do? What systems, training, and documentation would they need? The client had four months to make this happen, and no roadmap for how to get there.
The Solution
Working solo, I built the operational infrastructure to launch the new role from scratch. I reverse-engineered the existing hub vendor workflows by interviewing their team and mapping out their processes in Visio, since they were understandably resistant to change and slow to provide documentation. I then designed the future-state workflow with the new role integrated as an additional layer, defining handoff points and responsibilities between the new role and the existing vendor.
The design challenge was preserving the speed of the existing process while inserting a new touchpoint: the client wanted the new contractors to own all communication, which meant the hub vendor's case managers could no longer call directly for missing information and had to wait for the new role to establish contact first. I designed handoffs that maintained clarity about who owned what while building in mechanisms to prevent bottlenecks.
I also coordinated weekly cross-functional meetings with six internal teams—CRM, analytics, training, Legal, Compliance, and HR—to align on requirements and track progress, while working with each function separately throughout the week to move action items forward. I collaborated with the CRM team to define new fields and workflow configurations, worked with analytics to establish measurement frameworks for assessing the role's impact, partnered with Legal and Compliance to set language guidance for sensitive topics, and establish business rules like having a $10 limit for buying someone coffee during a visit, and coordinated with HR to navigate provisioning for equipment and system access. I worked with the hiring vendor to align onboarding and training schedules, extracting relevant materials from existing documentation and organizing them for upload into the vendor's training system. The medical social workers started on schedule and the role continues to operate successfully today.
Core Skills Leveraged
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This project required designing an entirely new operational model from scratch while integrating it into an existing system that was resistant to change. I started by reverse-engineering the status quo, mapping out the hub vendor's workflows through interviews and validation sessions since they were slow to provide documentation. Once I understood how things actually worked, I designed the future state with the new role added as an additional layer. The challenge was that adding a new touchpoint inherently creates dependencies and potential bottlenecks. The client wanted the new contractors to own all communication, which meant the hub vendor could no longer call individuals directly for missing information, inherently creating a slowdown in the process. I had to design handoffs that preserved the client's vision for a personalized experience while maintaining operational efficiency. This meant defining exactly when handoffs occurred, what information needed to be transferred, who was responsible for what actions, and how to escalate when things stalled. The workflow I built in Visio became the single source of truth that aligned the client, the hub vendor, and the new medical social workers on how the service model would actually function.
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The client had a clear vision: to introduce medical social workers who would build relationships and help individuals navigate barriers to care. My role was to build the operational plan for how to make it happen by translating the high-level concept into concrete, executable components. This meant breaking down the vision into discrete workstreams: What systems need to be configured? What data needs to be captured? What business rules govern what these social workers can say or do? What training do they need? What equipment and access do they require?
I worked with Legal and Compliance to define boundaries, developing language guidance for sensitive topics without scripting every conversation. I partnered with the CRM team to design new fields and workflows so the contractors could document their interactions and trigger the right next steps. I coordinated with analytics to establish metrics for measuring the role's impact on conversion and adherence months down the line. Each of these pieces required understanding not just what the client wanted to achieve, but how to operationalize it within the constraints of the organization's systems, policies, and existing vendor relationships. The result was a functioning service model that brought the client's vision to life on schedule.
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Implementation required coordinating six internal teams with different priorities and ensuring that all the pieces came together at the right time so the new contractors could start on day one. I ran weekly cross-functional meetings with CRM, analytics, training, Legal, Compliance, and HR to maintain visibility and alignment, but the real work happened in between those meetings as I worked with each function individually to drive their action items forward.
With the CRM team, I defined requirements for new fields and workflow configurations, collaborating with their business analyst and engineers to write stories for their sprints. With HR, I navigated internal processes for provisioning laptops, email accounts, and system access for contractors who would represent the client organization but be employees of a vendor. With the hiring vendor, I coordinated onboarding and training schedules to ensure new hires would be ready to start when the infrastructure was ready. I also extracted and compiled relevant training materials from existing client documentation and organized them for upload into the vendor's training system. Throughout, I tracked dependencies and flagged risks that could delay the launch. The complexity wasn't in any single workstream: it was in orchestrating all of them simultaneously while ensuring nothing fell through the cracks. The new role launched on schedule because I maintained both the big-picture view of how everything fit together and the tactical discipline to keep each workstream moving forward.