Background: As one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer has a number of functions, procedures and regulations to guide its operations. A primary knowledge-sharing vehicle for these procedures is that the company calls ‘Playbooks’. These are documents outlining how repeatable best practices can be implemented within business units and across the company. 

Pfizer faced a challenge in standardizing the development and distribution of playbooks, necessitating the creation of the playbook modularization project, and the playbook engine.  

Process: After a brief with the project owner, multiple exploratory interviews were conducted with authors and users of playbooks. We identified characteristics that led to the use of playbooks, as well as best practices for writing playbooks. After 2-3 rounds of iterative design and usability interviews, we determined that Pfizer’s culture was highly document-centric, thus modularization and syndication other information therein may not be successful in the near term. As a result, we designed and prototyped a document-centric approach and a roadmap for the design and development of future releases. 

Status: As of this writing, Pfizer was undergoing a restructuring process and it was expected that the company will contact its services contractor.