We Are MMIT

As the senior director of Client Delivery Services, Tom Sickel leads his team to deliver MMIT’s products, ensuring that all implementations follow a replicable, sustainable model to meet or exceed clients’ expectations. MMIT’s delivery services suite includes FormTrak in Veeva, Coverage Finder, Analytics, and RJ Health Solutions, among others. Tom also supports clients via MMIT’s Client Care and Bridging Services teams.

 Tell us a little bit more about your role.  

I oversee the Client Delivery Services team, which is actually comprised of a few different teams that all work together to implement many of the products we sell at MMIT. Our Delivery team is a mix of project managers, configuration analysts, and implementation engineers who work directly with our clients to bring the product live. Our Client Care Support team handles all Level 1 tickets that come into MMIT and ensures they are managed or escalated correctly. And finally, our Bridging Services team bridges third-party data sets with MMIT’s data sets, depending on the client’s needs.        

How did you join the company? What brought you to pharma? 

I’ve been with the company eight years now. From a background in business administration, I worked as a pharmacy tech and then spent years in pharmacy software, first selling and then implementing pharmacy management systems. I joined MMIT as an implementation manager, which was a job that interested me because it was relevant to my past experience, even though it was a different niche.

At the time, our team was only three people strong, and as the company grew and the demand for client delivery services grew, I took on new leadership roles within the team. Now, I’m proud to say that Client Delivery Systems has almost 50 team members in a variety of roles. It’s been an exciting few years, to be sure! 

What does your day-to-day usually look like? 

I’m in meetings all day every day. Essentially, no matter the topic, my role is to always be thinking strategically about what’s the best way we can enhance the product, improve delivery time, and guarantee delivery success.

At this point in my career, I’m not configuring products or managing projects myself, but I’m still focused on them in a different capacity. I’m strictly in a supportive, leadership role, working with our executives and our project teams to ensure that whatever issues we have are resolved. I use my deep understanding of our products’ underlying structure to help make sure our folks have the right information and can make the best decisions.

Mentoring my team is a huge priority for me. I’m always looking into how we can increase our product knowledge and soft skills. We’re implementing an internal website for better information sharing, and we do internal lunch-and-learns to grow our expertise. We’re also focused on cross-collaboration, so that people can learn different areas and be ready to move into a new role if an opportunity arises. 

What are some of the larger projects you’re working on? 

We’re implementing Monday.com for our project management needs, so I’ve been focused on that recently. We’ll be able to pull executive-level reporting out of that tool, and we’ll also be able to manage our resources more effectively. Another big project I’m working on is standardizing how we track transactional revenue during product delivery. We’ve done a lot of work this year cleaning up our processes and ensuring that we can recognize even partial revenue at any given time.

Aside from these two administrative projects, this year we’ve been focused on transitioning our new dynamic coverage look-up solution, CoverageFinder, from the product team to Client Delivery Services. Now that we’ve defined the implementation timelines and created options for the sales team, we’ll start working on improving those delivery times. We essentially never stop trying to improve our delivery timelines for every product—it’s an ongoing focus. 

What are some of the common challenges of your role? 

Probably our biggest challenge is that we move a such a rapid pace. That analogy about building the plane as you’re flying it really applies here. Sometimes, we’re moving so quickly that we miss a few of the key points to setting a product up for success, which ultimately causes strain further down the line when it’s time to implement it.

My team is addressing this challenge by working with the commercial teams and the Client Success team to set reasonable expectations, define roles and responsibilities, and create the documentation needed for commercial enablement. New products are amazing, but we always want to make sure we can implement them as effectively as possible without any hiccups—and sometimes that means slowing down just a bit and setting a more practical timeline. 

What’s been your career highlight to date? 

I would say my career highlight is growth, not just for me personally, but also for my team. I’ve moved up from implementation manager to a couple of different manager roles to a director to senior director rather quickly, which is great for me, but also not rare for this team.

One of the folks on my team was an intern on our Data Operations team, and then he became a configuration analyst, and moved up to a senior manager. He’s one of many who’ve found a strong career trajectory here, and I really appreciate that about MMIT.

As a leader, one of my primary jobs is to be the advocate for my team. It’s very satisfying to me when people on my team have the opportunity to grow with the organization, to be promoted to a new role with greater responsibilities. 

Which company principle resonates most with you? 

I would have to say ‘Resiliency, Mettle, and Grit,’ because it reflects how I approach my work. I won the MMIT Principle Award a few years ago for this principle, for my part in FormTrak in Veeva implementations, and it means a lot to me.

There will always be struggles when we start a new project: how do we attack this? How can we jump in there and face adversity head-on, so we can implement these products as efficiently as possible for our clients? You have to keep being creative and solving problems, and just get it done! 

What would you tell someone just starting their career with MMIT? 

Ask a million questions! In my opinion, the biggest key to success at MMIT is product knowledge. If you understand how the products work and how the data resonates within our products, you’ll go a long way. When we start new employees on my team, we begin with product training. Once folks know the products inside out, they’ll know how to configure them correctly. But for every role, I would advise new employees to ask a lot of questions about how everything interacts within our product ecosystem. 

Where do you see Norstella in the next year or two? 

I expect we’ll continue to bring all of the data from our five sister companies into one package, as we have the most robust set of data to offer clients. In the last year we’ve had more and more opportunities to cross-pollinate, like bringing The Dedham Group data into MMIT’s CoverageFinder product that we just launched.

With NorstellaLinQ, we’re moving toward true master data management, which will allow our clients to pull the insights they need out of integrated data sets, everything from real-world data to coverage data to forecasting data to our commercial intelligence data. We’ll forge this one great big ball of data that’s going to be very powerful in the industry, and very useful to our clients in making predictive decisions. 

What do you like most about working at MMIT? 

I love the people I work with, and I value the growth mindset here. In Client Delivery Services, we have the ability to build a really strong team with a culture that allows us to work at our highest potential.

When we do interviews, we stress the cultural fit questions, because it’s essential to us. We could have ten candidates all be adequate at doing the job, but we want to find the folks who fit into our ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality. We move fast and we are all motivated to get stuff done, but we don’t micromanage employees—we encourage you to go to that doctor’s appointment or take a long lunch when you need to.

What I hear over and over again from our team members is that everyone values how well we work together as a group. Nobody has that poisonous attitude of ‘that’s not my job.’ We collaborate every day to solve issues and complete our projects, and that’s what sets us apart.

In fact, our turnover rate in this stressful, volatile market is remarkably low: we’ve only lost one person in several years. I think our culture helps us keep this high-end talent and continue to grow the team as we do. 

What do you like to do outside of work? 

I spend a lot of time with friends and family, although my son is almost 15, so we don’t see him as much anymore—he’s always out and about! I also do a lot of DIY projects, like redoing a bathroom from scratch, or building a pond in our backyard. There’s always some kind of project I’m doing on the side.

0

0