By Adam Turteltaub

Krista Muszak is organized. More importantly, the longtime compliance professional and Senior Manager, Regional Process & Optimization Lead for Pfizer knows how to keep others organized as well.

She will be sharing some of this wisdom in Nashville at the 2024 HCCA Compliance Institute in the session “Muda, Mura, Muri to Veni Vidi Vici: Applying Project Management and Process Improvement to Your Compliance Program.”  She also shares a bit of it here in the latest Compliance Perspectives podcast.

First, she explains that the title comes from terms used by Toyota to improve the process flow at their plants and eliminate waste.

Muda is about eliminating waste and activities that don’t add value.

Mura speaks to addressing variability in operations to increase stability and reduce unnecessary variations.

Mudi addresses not overloading people and the business with too many asks, such as releasing a round of training at the same time as year-end activities.

Embracing these concepts can increase efficiency and effectiveness. At the same time adopting a project management approach helps build guardrails around your efforts. Use it to identify who is responsible, who is accountable, who needs to be informed and who needs to consulted. This brings clarity into who the key players are and their responsibilities.

With the right people on board, a project charter can be extremely effective, identifying what the project goals are, and what they aren’t. From there it is time, she explains, to move on to measure, analyze, improve and establish controls for your initiative.

Listen in to learn more about how to bring greater effectiveness and efficiency for your compliance efforts.