February 17, 2025
Potato trial at International Potato Center glasshouse on ILRI campus in Nairobi, Kenya. Credit: Breeding Resources, 2024. Written with Julie Puech, Breeding for Tomorrow.
A review of Accelerated Breeding’s ReOganize Work Packages achievements, 2022-2024
By Sarah Hearne, Chief Scientist and Innovation Officer, CIMMYT, and former Lead of Accelerated Breeding’s ReOrganize Work Package
In agricultural science, success isn’t solely determined by technical prowess—it’s also reliant on effective organizational processes and strategies. Through ReOrganize, a Work Package of CGIAR Accelerated Breeding, process management working groups delved into how breeders do things. They didn’t focus on the technical intricacies but on the organization of breeding itself, monitoring of performance of breeding and the empowerment of CGIAR breeders and scientists in their mission to deliver the crop varieties that the world urgently needs. ReOrganize did this by leveraging business process management tools to do so.
Process management in crop breeding
No matter how groundbreaking scientific advancements may be, crop breeding, like any other process, lacks efficiency without a robust structure and streamlined processes. Accelerated Breeding recognizes the need for a common understanding of processes and terms across CGIAR Centers, breeding programs and partners, including National Agricultural Research and Extension Systems (NARES), and funders.
Accelerated Breeding’s Work Package ReOrganize used techniques drawing from the industry sector, such as SIPOCs (for Supplier, Input, Process, Output, Customer) to document which breeding activities are covered by cohesive groups of processes. SIPOCs detail the interdependencies, interactions, and handovers between these groups, enabling a clearer understanding of responsibilities and linkages. Ultimately, this contributes to guiding breeding programs towards more efficient and optimized operations, to deliver faster, better and at lower cost.
In 2023, Breeding Resources Initiative launched three Process Teams – Lab Services, Trialling & Nursery, and Breeding Analytics – tasked to develop SIPOCs for their group of processes. A fourth team, Product Development, was established by Accelerated Breeding.
For each SIPOCs, a unified stage-plan has been developed. A stage-plan serves as a roadmap, elucidating inputs, outputs, and handover points between processes. Stage-gates, enabling users to move from one stage of the stage-plan to another, is also ready.
To better understand how these elements articulate, let’s take an analogy.
In a garage, there are distinct groups of services that can be performed by specialized mechanics, such as tire replacement, car body repair, or brake maintenance. These groups of services all require a set of processes – which can be described by a SIPOC.
Now, let’s take a specific group, like tire replacement. Changing a tire is a process that involves multiple steps, such as lifting your car with a jack, removing the nuts, and eventually replacing the tire. These steps represent the different stages of a stage-plan.
Next, the challenge lies in determining when and how to move from one step to another, such as knowing when it’s safe to lift the car with the jack once it’s positioned on the tool. And, when the vehicle is elevated, how can you be certain that it’s secure and convenient to begin removing the nuts?
This is where a stage-gate comes into play; it provides a checklist, or gates, that separate stages and determine whether a product or knowledge is ready to progress from one stage to another. These gates ensure transparency and informed decision-making, making it easier to document who made the decision, based on which factors.
If all the indicators of gate 1 are met (the car is safely positioned on the jack, the wheel is accessible, etc.), you can move to stage 2; lifting the car onto the jack.
Similarly, CGIAR crop breeding process management working groups are developing stage-plans and stage-gates for each SIPOCs, or groups of processes, helping Centers and partners decide how to do things and in which order. For product development, this means moving a product from crossing & screening to early testing for example, and so on. Standardizing the stages and the gates also ensures that everyone uses the same framework, moving from a stage to another after meeting the same criteria.
Speaking the same language: common terminologies, KPIs and skills
Harmonizing language is crucial to ensure that CGIAR Centers and partners have a shared understanding of the processes, steps, and checklists. A common set of terms also guarantees that individuals joining the process from outside CGIAR get up to speed fast and can comprehend what is being done at any time.
Defining common metrics and establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is another requirement of process management. These indicators, tailored to specific contexts, enable a comparative analysis of breeding performance across crops and Centers. 24 high-level indicators have been developed across all crops and forages commodities, utilizing the same metrics. Each stage of the stage-plan is accompanied by a selection of these indicators – and achieving them means the team can proceed to the next stage.
Process management also requires defining a common list of skills, to enhance accountability and responsibility, facilitate clear and harmonized decision-making and address skill gaps across stages. With the skill mapping developed by ReOrganize, Centers seeking specific expertise can exchange skills with other Centers.
Collaboration is key to develop all the elements of process management. Under Accelerated Breeding, ReOrganize collaborates with other work packages, such as Accelerate, to align with the Initiative’s overall breeding strategy.
Collaboration with other Initiatives, such as Market Intelligence and Seed Equal, ensures seamless product development from conception to delivery to farmers. The goal is to create an end-to-end process, streamlined and harmonized, with common terms, metrics and KPI frameworks.
Implementation challenges: from teams to individuals
While process management teams consist of representatives from breeding programs advancing the process management work, true success requires buy-in from individuals. The multistakeholder process involves obtaining approval from breeding program leads, who serve as sponsors for implementation and showcase the benefits of adopting the stage-plan approach with concrete examples. IT systems play a crucial role in facilitating the transition and ensuring that common terms and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are integrated into systems, such as the Breeding Scheme Manager, the Breeding Portal and the Service Request Portal and the determination of some metrics for indicators is supported by platforms like Bioflow, ensuring harmonization in the way different metrics are calculated across breeding programs.
This work is transformative, acknowledging that success in crop breeding goes beyond technical excellence. It requires a well-structured, collaborative, common and inclusive process management framework that adapts to the evolving landscape of CGIAR and partners’ crop breeding work.
Process management also looks ahead to potential revisions and holds the promise of extending its benefits to other CGIAR teams, beyond crop breeding.
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