 Hello everyone, my name is Natalia Andrew-Chuk and I'm a statistical data scientist at the R-Centro of Excellence advisor and today I'm going to tell you about the R-Centro of Excellence journey and the adoption of R-Advisor. And we will discuss the R-Community and what it takes to build sustainable and engaging our community. And I want to start to my talk saying that last year I presented at PositCon where I had a chance to give a presentation about building our community and community of our users advisor and it was like a 20-minute talk. So today I have a chance to expand on a few key points that I provided back then and provide more information regarding the certain initiatives we run. So let's begin with answering the question of why we are on the R-Adoption journey advisor and why we need to build the community of our users. Here's my favorite quote from Alice in Wonderland. My dear, here we must run as fast as we can just to stay in place and if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that. And in my opinion this perfectly describes what happened in a pharma world when it comes to adoption of R. Pharma companies are quickly adopting R and there are numerous seminars and presentations about R-Adoption through like R-Consortional like this one and if you've been to professional conferences related to R in the past few years of programming and pharma you've seen a lot of those R-Adoption presentations. So for instance the talk you see on the slide given by Mike K. Smith was presented at Posit Kong last year as well. So R-Adoption is a hot topic in the pharma world. Adopting new language within the organization is hard especially if you have hundreds of programmers sitting in different parts of your organization from supply chain to bioinformatics and on top of that they're all in different places when it comes to their majority. So some of them can be might be beginners some of them are experts and like everyone in between and colleagues also have different motivation and different resources for learning R. Therefore building the community connecting people and their experiences providing resources becomes vital for success of the R-Adoption and community building. But where do we start? This is such a big undertaking when something happens fast and something is very new you need to have a good structure in place to accomplish it. So you want to give people appropriate tools to build their expertise and connect them with each other. In 1943 the Psychological Review Journal published a paper called A Theory of Human Motivation. The author of this paper was Abraham Muslow. This was the paper where he proposed the idea that received the name of Muslow's hierarchy of needs. According to his theory human needs are arranged in hierarchy with the physiological survival needs on the bottom and more creative and intellectually oriented self-actualization needs at the top. So Muslow argued that the survival needs must be satisfied before individual can satisfy the higher level needs. Although Muslow never himself created the pyramid to represent the hierarchy of needs the pyramid became the most popular way to illustrate the proposed idea because we humans tend to illustrate hierarchies in shape of the pyramid. Here on the slide you see the pyramid that consists of the layers otherwise needs starting from the most basic lower level needs like food and water and safety progressing to other psychological and self-fulfillment needs. Muslow's idea suggested the most basic level of needs must be met before individual will strongly desire or focus motivation upon the secondary or higher level needs. Similarly when approaching building the community and internalizing new programming language we need to identify the our adoption and community building hierarchy of needs within the organization. There are certain needs that must be met first that are vital before we can move on to a higher level once. Having the hierarchy in the form of the pyramid is also great representation since it shows that it is important to have a strong foundation if you want to get to the top. So during this presentation I'm going to share with you the our adoption and community building hierarchy of needs that we identify and currently fulfilling advisor. So knowing the needs of your community is very important because it helps to establish proper initiatives to fulfill these needs. But before we jump in into describing the initiatives we established I need to go back in time and tell you about what made it possible. In 2022 Mike K. Smith and Douglas Robinson took on the initiative of creating and assembling the our center of excellence advisor. The center that would coordinate our strategy across business lines with advisor. The idea was the following the RCOE was going to be comprised of two teams our core team and our SWAT team. And these teams would work together to accomplish the R-centric goals within organization. The R core team would ensure cross-functional representation and the SWAT team is going to be the R-centric group dedicated resource with dedicated resources strong technical skills. So let's look at these groups more closely. Our core team manages a set of initiative streams within the company that builds culture and strategy around R. Here are the set of the initiative streams that we defined for the R core team to run. The team takes care of the internal outreach and builds the internal community initiatives. It identifies opportunity for new training material and curates internal training. It adopts processes, ways of working automation, anything new. And then it also distributes information about advances in art through newsletters and keeps community updated on the new technologies on new art packages. It builds communication channels. It also influences the external environment through cross-pharma initiatives like art consortium, art and pharma, views, etc. And the core team also helps the SWAT team to prioritize and identify consultancy opportunities. The SWAT team members take part in the R core team initiatives and lead some of them. But what is the SWAT team? Our SWAT team acronym stands for the scientific workflows and analytic tools. We are the internal consultancy group within Pfizer and we're the R experts for groups that don't have their own R experts within their departments. And we're also professional community builders. The SWAT team consists of six people you see on the photo led by Mike K Smith. And community building and R adoption is not our site project. It is one of our priorities. We're focused on our projects specifically and we also have community building and R adoption initiatives in our goals for each semester. And we treat those as project deliverables. And at the end of the semester we're accountable for the outcome. The R SWAT team also has its own objectives. We provide technical input to experts and training help for beginners. We help developers to go from code that works to the code that is sustainable for the long term, avoiding and reducing the technical debt, potential technical debt I would say. We provide strategic solutions to various problems across the organization that can or should be solved with R. And we also connect colleagues who are looking for a solution to particular problems with those who already solved it, which streamlines the problem solving and reduces the duplicate work. And since its establishment in 2022, the R SWAT team has come a long way and we tackled a lot of goals and establishing initiatives that fit our community and our adoption hierarchy of needs. We work tirelessly to fulfill every layer of that pyramid and with our initiatives and we're continuing doing so. So without further ado, let's climb this pyramid together and I'll show you the way. And we start with tier one. So in muscle theory, psychological needs are the base of the hierarchy. So food, water, sleep, shelter, so the needs that have to be fulfilled for us humans to survive. And in our adoption and community building terms, fundamental needs translate into having proper IT infrastructure and support because this is the fundamental need of our users. Having infrastructure and IT support is very critical. It is a foundation for all our projects. At Pfizer, we use darker containers and suite of professional positive tools for our R projects and RIT department support supports all of them. RIT colleagues ensure that all these tools work properly and work together. We use docker containers and positive package manager to ensure reproducibility of results in production environment. Our colleagues have access to various containers that are well tested and each docker container has specific version of R along with defined R packages and their specific versions. So once released, the docker container stays unchanged which ensures that the program developed using it will run in a year and two or five and more after the analysis was initially developed. So these containers, they're available on HPC grid. And when you start the workbench instance, you can pick and use one of those. And you can also view the contents of those and the positive package manager. And we release maybe a container every half a year after it goes through the vigorous testing. Then going back, we use the workbench and we use cloud for day-to-day work and training. And then we use positive connect for sharing the results of our work. And this is the infrastructure that allows our programmers to perform the analysis they need from start to finish. And as I mentioned earlier, IT supports all of these tools and the SWAT team works with IT to define best practices to communicate our needs and the needs of our community. And we have regular check-ins to address any questions and concerns regarding the infrastructure. The relationships that we establish with IT colleagues help us to support our community because we are the bridge between IT and the end user, the programmer. And this pretty much covers the infrastructure aspect and what we have at Pfizer in terms of the IT infrastructure for R. And now that we discuss this most fundamental level of our hierarchy, let's move on to the next tier. In Maslow's hierarchy, the second tier belongs to safety needs. People want to experience order, predictability, and control in their life. Same comes for when we adopt a new tool. We already discussed how essential it is having a reliable IT infrastructure, but we also need to make sure our colleagues feel secure and safe when it comes to working with R and using this for structure we established. So how do we do that? The tier of our hierarchy of needs that corresponds with safety needs is covered by proper documentation and training that we developed. Experienced R programmers will know how to access work bench and deploy the shinier. But what if you're a beginner R programmer and you don't know anything about R? How do you know if tool is working properly? This is where documentation and training come into place and provide safety math. If you know what to expect from the tool, then you can assess if it's working properly. So let's talk about the documentation first. Having a uniform advice and guidance for colleagues, especially those new to R is crucial. So we as a team took an upon ourselves to establish a single source of documentation that's available to all our colleagues worldwide. And then they can access at any time. At Pfizer, we have the internal knowledge website that we customize for our needs. So we chose Confluence as our platform. Confluence is the tool provided by Atlassian. You might have heard of Atlassian if you ever used JIRA. This is one of their other products. So this is essentially a team workspace that consists of dynamic pages and different spaces. And we have the R and Pfizer space that consists of numerous pages that are organized by topic. In the R and Pfizer space, we publish numerous articles, guides, and other pieces of important documentation to promote and share the best practices with our colleagues. The rule of thumb is if we get the same question from our colleagues more than once, this indicates that we need to write a knowledge article on it and then post it to Confluence by supporting and promoting Confluence. We accomplish a couple of things. So first, we're saving time in the long run by gathering all the information in one place and pointing colleagues towards it. And then second, by making sure everyone gets the same uniform advice that our team agreed on. So the question you see on the slide used to be asked at least once a week. Like now that we have this article, this solve the problem and this link gets passed throughout the community by colleagues. And documentation that we publish on Confluence, it varies in topics. To name a few examples, for example, the recent articles include the use of rent package for R and R ENB, I should say, I don't know why I call and run for R projects. Or we made set of articles on efficient R programming and good practice or using R environment file and so on so forth. So a lot of different topics. So this pretty much covers the documentation. So now let me tell you more about the training. Over the years, we had a variety of training sessions on various topics from experience, our programmers provided for our internal R community. The trainers were either experts from Posit or within Pfizer and all sessions varied in scope and expertise level. We conducted sessions to help beginners get started with R. We also recorded like short videos that can be viewed as tips and tricks in addition to the beginner training. There's also more in-depth intermediate level training. We have getting started with Shiny series. Mastering the tidy burst training is another series of sessions where we dive in into tidy burst packages. And some of these sessions are show and tell and others are hands-on workshops. And speaking of hands-on workshops, we all know that the important training aspect is learning programming by doing. So we created a series of hands-on exercises where programmers can get their hands dirty. So we have 13-minute projects that will be open source this year. We're planning on doing so. So each project is an R markdown file covering a dedicated topic. It can be created a function visualizing data and these exercises are relevant to programmers and clinical research. So trainees can access and perform exercises at their own time, at their own pace and complete the challenges at the end of each exercise. And all these training sessions with exception of our short videos were live sessions that were recorded and posted later to the internal SharePoint website so that new and existing employees can revisit those training sessions at any time. We also noticed that this might be challenging for new R users to go through the trainings. If the environment is not properly set up or the context is not relevant or too hard for certain level of R users. This means that we need to help our co-workers navigate the content and listen to the feedback. For our trainings this year we started utilizing Posit Cloud. This is a great solution for us since we have a lot of trainees and they're all at different levels and with the cloud trainers can have different sessions with preconfigured training environments. So trainers can install and load all the packages that are needed prior to the training and this ensures that when everyone when colleagues get access to the exercise they also get access to the same environment to the same set of packages and their versions so it streamlines the process of actual training and reduces the troubleshooting time. And training is a very broad topic but I think I gave you the general idea of how we approach it. So now let's go back to our pyramid and look at the next tier. The third tier in Maslow's hierarchy of needs is the loneliness and love needs. So people are social creatures. We need interpersonal relationships. We want to feel connected with other human beings and be part of a group. And in our adoption journey this translates into creating channels for community support and inclusivity. Learning new technologies and adopting to the new ways of working is incredibly hard. Therefore it is crucial to connect with people and give resources to support each other so that when colleagues hit the bottom of the learning pit they have someone out there to help them to get out of it. One of the tools that help us to accomplish this goal is R&Pfizer Microsoft Teams channel. It comprises over 1,100 R users and anyone at Pfizer can join this channel. This is an incredible resource for community engagement. We have several channels under the R&Pfizer teams umbrella such as general, R&Pharma, R questions and answers, training resources, etc. And these channels under this R&Pfizer team umbrella there we post news announcements, latest updates. But more importantly this is a platform where our colleagues seek and get help. When you're battling the programming issue it might seem that you're the only one in the world facing the problem and if you spend too much time on it without any help it might get very lonely and frustrating real quick. But I assure you they're always someone out there who either knows the answer to your question and can help you right away or who has the same question and you can join the forces together and look for the solution together. Therefore we encourage colleagues to ask questions out there in the open because by asking your questions on Microsoft Teams channel our colleagues helping themselves they're getting closer to solving their issue that blocks them and once they build some R expertise they can help others by answering their questions. And our main goal as community builders is to help colleagues be more comfortable not only asking but also answering each other questions because this is the way we found the community becomes sustainable. Prior to this channel being established our colleagues were seeking help within their own reach asking the colleagues they knew were good at R or asking the internet Microsoft Teams channel gave colleagues access to R and Pfizer community to other colleagues that face similar problems working in the same company following the same standards procedures and policies. Googling the question is great we'll know that but if you're very new to R you might not even know like what to Google and what tools are available what packages available. And when introducing me to the channel when I first started my manager Mike Smith once told me the story about one colleague in stat programming group in California asked if anyone knew how to connect to R or a code database and colleague from global supply organization and other part of the world in Ireland so it's like half of the world came across this problem earlier sold it and then responded suggesting using appropriate library. So this answer helped the US colleagues solve the problem pretty quick and this is just one of the examples of how community supports itself now we have tens if not hundreds of examples like these this is just one of them. Another great initiative that we run to support the community engagement is the book club so back in early 2023 our team decided to initiate a book club and for our book club we surprise, surprise, picked the R for data science second edition book because we thought it gives the most comprehensive overview and is suitable for beginners. In order to initiate the book club we made a sign up form it was like a Microsoft form and it was pretty short and included questions like do you have any experience with the book what is your role and location. We also asked colleagues the question to assess their level of R usually it is very hard for programmers to assess themselves especially they're given options like beginner, intermediate and advanced because it all depends on who you take as a reference do you take your colleague as a reference or pathway with them so this is the question where we provided a little bit more examples so colleagues can choose from and have answer options like I don't have any experience with R or I can write simple code but I need to help I am familiar with major packages or I have enough experience to write my own packages so stuff like this and this information from the sign up form would have given us comprehensive overview of the book club attendees and give us enough information to organize the book club. So once the form was ready we posted the announcement on Microsoft Teams encouraging to fill out the forms those who wanted to sign up for the book club and we also used like a lot of other platforms we announced it during the calls where our users were present we also used emails and various distribution lists to reach colleagues and all in all we had around 132 colleagues who signed up and we aimed to have seven to 11 colleagues per group so we divided colleagues into 14 study groups and the geography of span from North America through Europe to Asia and in some cases the group assignments were obvious for example we had six people sign up from Europe and eight from Philippines so you know here's your group however the countries like US where we had 80 people sign up we made the effort to compose the groups in the same time zone and make sure that each group had beginners and experts or I should say more advanced our developers together because we wanted colleagues with different level of expertise on the same team once the teams were composed we contacted the regional groups asking who would like to volunteer and become a group lead and we got pretty good response rate for folks who wanted to become team leads and once we identify the group leads we scheduled the meetings for appropriate time zones and led the kickoff meetings and the kickoff meetings we provided like all the support materials we could and we made it very clear that we didn't want the group leads to have additional burden like overhead to to their day-to-day job so we distributed as much helpful information we could and at this point the group leads were free to organize their own meetings with their own schedule communicate with their group members and set the meetings the way it worked best for them after about a few months later we came back and distributed the feedback survey to see how the things were going and we received about 50 response rate and as you can get the majority of responders were colleagues who made the effort to stick with attending the sessions because it is hard to do that like every week however few indicated that they have stopped attending the sessions throughout the month of working on this initiatives and leading one of the groups I saw colleagues like leaving and joining groups and joy and groups joining forces together and some groups were meeting every other week some groups were meeting every week and the biggest obstacle for this initiative is that colleagues indicated in the survey were day-to-day job commitments and schedule conflicts so the date when day-to-day job commitments increase it become harder to attend sessions and read their book on a scheduled basis one colleague wrote in their survey my lack of attendance is not a reflection of the colleagues who work hard to put this together and facilitate the sessions I simply didn't have enough time to actively participate and have to stop attending all together and another colleague wrote I'd say my sessions are going great they're organic and I think it's nice to give the group some freedom to customize according to the group preferences so some groups are still going through the book together because of the schedule they picked and some have finished and overall we received a positive feedback and some colleagues expressed willingness to join other group group sorry book clubs in the future and as a result the two teams proceeded to read the mastering shiny book club after that so we have two groups doing that right now so this is the story of the book club advisor and it continues moving on the other things we're doing for community support is keeping our internal community informed and engaged with what happening in broader external our community for instance if my SWAT team colleagues and I visit the external conference we will always present the highlights of the conferences and make summary of latest and greatest and most useful developments that we think are valuable for Pfizer right now but we don't go to the conferences monthly although I wish but every month or every other month we release the advances in our newsletter that is highlighting latest and greatest in the art community and tools and events and this keeps our colleagues informed all year long and since the beginning of the year we also invited our community leaders to present for our internal community this year we have Rich Yan-Yan presenting on the open source collaboration and GT package progress in January and in a few days on Monday we're going to welcome Hadley Wickham presentation we're super excited about it so now that we discuss all these initiatives for community engagement and support it's time to go back to our pyramid and see what the next layer is the next year in musculos hierarchy is esteem needs this includes the feeling of accomplishment and respect esteem presents the typical human desire to be accepted and valued by others and the art adoption community building pyramid it translates into showcasing your work when your colleagues are getting more comfortable with programming and art they start being involved in our projects and they're eager to show the results of their work in hopes that it will help others and showcase the hard work they did in order to establish proper channel through which colleagues can showcase their work we created the community of practice and it became a very successful initiative community of practice is one hour monthly meeting that consists of two 20 minute presentations usually followed by 10 minutes of questions the presentations vary in topics and our expertise level to keep all colleagues engaged and presentations are recorded and we upload all these recording from the event to the corresponding SharePoint website to make sure they are accessible for colleagues for new employees and for colleagues who didn't who missed the sessions and didn't have a chance to attend one since mid 2022 we held 17 sessions in various presentations so to name a few on the topic of packages we had a great presentation called the wonders of the point blank package what there was one presentation of lessons learned like our bad habits and there even been like broader topics about the learning journey one person presented or navigating the our landscape with the help of our center of excellence so they were sharing their learning journey during the community of practice these meetings reveal the opportunity for growth for our colleagues who are just starting their journey they the the colleagues they're presented with various ways they can advance in their learning when they see their peers presentations we learned that colleagues love to share the results of their work and that these meetings help us to connect colleagues with each other that wouldn't otherwise meet and showcasing the work is also a great avenue to receiving feedback from the broader audience and hear the questions that audience might have regarding your projects or your coding solutions so now that we talked about showcasing let's move on to the last and final tier of the pyramid the tip of the iceberg in musculosperamidus need of self actualization this refers to the realization of a person's potential need of self fulfillment and personal growth so put this into perspective maybe you've been in this situation where you found a new hobby let's say drawing and at first you needed a little push or maybe a lot of help when you first started but as time has passed you started to feel more comfortable and then the things that needed a lot of effort first became easier or even in second nature with every step you took and then you became better at it you became much better at it you even started asking yourself a lot of what if questions you became more comfortable with the experimenting and started noticing how certain things could be improved and maybe you created something new and beautiful like this painting so in our adoption and community-building journey this is the tier of the pyramid where our colleagues sharing their ideas and giving back to the community this is where they become more comfortable with their skills they become more confident and creative in their own code this is the tier where they have everything in their own hands and they try to improve the world around them and also inspire others at this level a lot of push should come from colleagues themselves but we do provide some avenues for channeling this energy first we host our advisor hangout event that happens every other wednesday at anyone advisor interested in programming can join so this we adopted this format the data science hangout format from posits led by rachel demsey the positive events if you haven't joined one it happens every thursday at noon est and i encourage you to join once in a while and anyone from the data community can join so similarly at visor doing our own internal event we invite a colleague we call the colleague a featured guest to talk about their our journey what excites them about our what they're working on these meetings are not recorded and all questions our audience led and this is a great opportunity to share your story and connect with fellow programmers this is where colleagues can inspire each other share lessons learn and talk about what made them the programmers they are we started hangouts in 2023 and already conducted 19 sessions and if you want to set up hangouts for example at your own company i suggest scheduling guests in advance and learning a little bit more about colleagues you invite prior to the session this is not the easiest initiative to run since the audience might be a bit shy at times asking questions however you know once your community grows people know more each other they become more comfortable with asking questions and sharing their stories and the sessions are not recorded so this always helps another more technical route for idea sharing and inspiring others and giving back is to become a part of the external working group and get involved into the open source development at Pfizer we have colleagues who are involved in various are related external working groups we have a monthly meetings where we connect with these colleagues and we share the ideas we discuss industry developments with each other and see what we can and should internalize at Pfizer as part of this initiative we also distribute external working groups newsletter to keep broader Pfizer our community informed and engaged and here we are we got to the top of our our adoption community building hierarchy of needs and now in conclusion i'd like to say that adopting new language and building the community is like putting the puzzle pieces together it is hard it is time consuming and at the same time it's very rewarding because with the right approach you can see the progress the initiatives we set up at Pfizer are not set in stone they grow and they change in our community changes with it and the community needs changed but one of the most important things in our journey is to be agile so listen to the feedback and at the same time we try to be laser focused on what's important in the long run for us we are focused on supporting enabling energizing our community because engaged community solves business problems faster and more efficient way it supports innovation knowledge sharing collaboration and create supporting learning environment and if you're just starting your adoption and community building journey or thinking of one remember to be patient our team is trying out different formats to keep our community advisor engaged and fulfill our pyramid of needs some initiatives get traction right away others take time to get on track but this is all part of the journey for us and we know that being persistent and consistent and listening to our community's feedback is key to figuring out what works best for the organization thank you so much I'll be happy to take any questions see one question one open question are people from our SWAT 100% dedicated to build this RCOE yes we're 100% dedicated resource for RCOE same questions for the R learners are they encouraged oh sorry questions are moving are they encouraged by their line managers to attend the training sessions and to test our implementation in their daily routine this seems critical to me achieve my any change management this is a great question uh because because we didn't have especially like in our book club survey um some of the feedback was kind of uh you know my managers were very encouraging and others had like troubles to find time and in their day-to-day tasks for our engagement so I think it very much since Pfizer is such a huge organization it very much depends on what department you're on what manager you have what projects you're working on there are definitely people who are trying to like get ahead of the curve and learn R even if they don't have any R projects um on the other hand there are people who actively involved in the R projects and they're managed they're people who are managing them actually creating R trainings as well so of course they're kind of like more in the loop for training so I totally agree that management plays a big role in how much time you can spend on it do you use any menu front ends for R like blue sky statistics oh sorry the questions are moving I am not aware of those the only front end for R I use this shiny if that's if you can consider this is front end I think so but yeah I don't um maybe in other parts of our organization but I don't think I know any of these I'm sorry Bob um one sorry I don't know the name but there's a question is R the only major programming language advisor what was the situation before this initiative so no R is not the only major programming language advisor people use variety of languages advisor it's probably so many languages like even more languages that we know SAS is very prevalent language advisor people use R people use Python you know people in IT may use so many other languages the situation before this initiative was that I could only speak for R is that um people were using R but it wasn't the initiative where they could connect with each other and now we're trying to connect our users specifically so that they can get the support and help um I think that answers the question FK asked can you tell more about the start of the R adoption start okay what is the top down or more bottom up to design this hierarchy how can I inspire my company from the bottom this is a great question this is a very loaded question so to speak from my perspective the R adoption started before I joined Pfizer I think I was one of the um results of the R adoption and um I there was definitely push from the management so I I started I I shared the story about how Mike Smith um Douglas Robinson sorry I'm like trying to go through the slides and show it to you uh started this initiative so they were the real kind of push for starting the RCOE and they definitely got um let me reshare this here you go and they definitely got the men they showed the value and they definitely got the um managers so-called buy-in and happening what's happening seeing what's happening within the broader R push and pharma and what other companies are doing was definitely part of it and then they also as leaders had some prior experiences with creating similar teams so this is how the R adoption started as and as a result and RCOE started as a result I was hired so I can't really speak too much into like what happened before that um but I do agree that it is very hard to inspire the company from the bottom what I would say is uh there are a lot of examples maybe like this R consortium webinar like other R consortium webinars um other initiatives other presentations um that you can share with the management and then um you can show the value of those initiatives and if you have um certain projects that can be or should be accomplished with R and they have certain metrics you can also um try to like make this kind of like sales pitch of how and why you should transition to R um and our community is uh very accepting and I think um you know you can join like data science hangouts there are multiple slack channels you can join to see what projects you are able to take on and maybe what open source projects you can adopt at your own company that are using R and since R community is very receptive you can ask for advice at maybe other R conferences so I think just like you know step by step um you might get there sorry it was a long answer but I hope this helps what are the biggest challenges you all faced in determining the IT requirements and getting buy-in from your IT department this is a great question I am very lucky to join the company where I just had access to Positwork bench Positcloud it was all handled before I started my job is to make sure um I communicate with IT department I see latest and greatest I ask them about the features and you know how it can be like implemented and um write conference articles help users to organize it um in their heads but yeah I don't think I can speak to a bigger picture unfortunately um of how this infrastructure like was set up in the first place how to join the R and Pfizer Microsoft teams channel great question so step one join Pfizer step two um shoot me a message and teams and I'll add you to the teams channel otherwise unfortunately it's not open to the public however there are great channels that are open to the public so you can always join the r4 data science slide community um learning community this is this could be a great alternative if you do not work at Pfizer how do your our users interact with other languages python sas do you have a undefined platform where all languages can co-exist so depending on which language you use you would use like appropriate idea I believe I'm not a sas users but a user but you would use sas studio um for sas I if you are our user and your python user like you can either pick your id or if you're working in in the multi lingual uh team you can also use let's say porto if part of your team work in python and part of your team work in sas or you can use packages like reticulate but I think sas users have their own sas studio platform they use um I don't think we have the unified platform I'm the unless I'm not aware of one okay I do um sorry let me thank you what are the future milestones our advisor regarding the our adoption uh that's a good question I um I don't know actually like how much you can talk about it but to hint is that um our colleagues are involved into the various um our external working groups and some of them are uh for example our submission working group is a great group for pilots some of them are completed some of them on the way it's all out in the open it's all in github and we think it's a great um you know great effort and something to look into more closely and see how it can fit with advisor needs and I do have I want to add to the previous like infrastructure question um so I gotta note that our previous our environment was managed by business lines rather than IT org and it was a little bit messy um and then we managed to pursue the IT org and business lines that having a professional environment would allow business to do the work rather than manage the environments so this this was our approach so it's you know time and money saving in the long run my impression is that users have are downloaded directly on their system are they allowed to install their own our packages um so this is a great question we as SWAT team we as RCR we strongly strongly strongly encourage our uh colleagues to use our workbench because this environment is well controlled because you you can reproduce your results um and it's available it's out there uh however we do have opportunity for people I shouldn't say opportunity I should say possibility for people to download the art studio through our you know internal digital um website and they do do so however whatever they install on their own machine we're not responsible um for so you cannot do the message is that you cannot do any work production work or any work that would be looked at someone rather than you other than you like you can do this on desktop all the things you can do on your desktop are sandbox playground um doing something you know like small projects but nothing major that is considered to be production work how do you decide which are packages can be allowed in your containers what testing is needed there is a set of tests that we wrote uh a while back well when I say we um I should really um say mic um and this is like his question his like expertise rather so the the packages that can be allowed those are usually the ones that are well documented well tested packages on their own that we trust and then we'll also do like the the um the testing on top so I would say if your pack like if if this is like a random package on github we would need to look into it but if this is d plier then you know it's it's going to be allowed into container I hope that answers the question okay bob provided the link for similar talk um that would be great if I could copy the um link and look at the talk something to bob what is the size of Pfizer rcwe team so the c o team comprises of swat team and swat team is like six people and the um the core team um it was around like eight to ten people but it is a little bit fluid because there are certain changes that can happen for example people get um more work load and they are not able to participate maybe this particular quarter and then they can hand off like some of their um some of the tasks that they were doing to other colleagues or their new colleagues that are joining Pfizer or were at Pfizer but really want to participate in core team so this is a little bit fluid but I would say core team comprises maybe like around 10 people but the core team um are not kind of like full time our people as opposed to swat team how do you monitor the progress of practices and the adoption of this new language this is um this is one of the hard things I guess to monitor so we only can go so far in monitoring as a team so for example when we were performing like when we were doing the mini projects we kind of focused on mini projects and completion of mini projects for our department maybe like for one semester and we made an effort to schedule the calls where we go through the mini projects we had the system of like buddies that were kind of more experienced our programmers were assigned to people who were going through the projects and then as we progressed we asked people to submit their finished mini projects um so this was kind of like the monitoring of the product progress back then but now that we have a cloud this can be streamlined because cloud provides you with the capabilities so this is this is around the training um for the book club I think I addressed some of that when I was talking about the feedback this is one of the like also hard initiative to monitor because it's also like spent across the globe and sometimes people you know 50 response rate is good but um um it's sometimes it's hard to get uh people's feedback but all in all I think new projects that are like starting in R or the amount of people who come for the consoles for our SWAT team with our projects is also one indicator um there's also um like there were a few tools that were adopted from from the open source and to Pfizer so I think this is a good indication of the initiative going well and people exploring new tools and started using odd tools in their day to day job how many packages for submission apps you have in the container well we do have a lot of containers um I don't even I'm not sure even how many at least and um over the years I can't like I don't want to pull up the board and stuff but each container can comprise I don't know um oh I just received a little note that we have 1500 plus packages in the container so somebody ran a metrics real quick so here you go 1500 plus packages for submission purpose working on SEM, Adam, and TLF who validates the packages that will be used such as admiral that's a great question we have like a separate group who handles the admiral package we actually have one group that developed like one of the admiral packages like the extensions um who validates the packages I'm not I'm not sure I can pinpoint who exactly does that because I unfortunately I wasn't like and that you know over there working on this so sorry I was I was thinking it's like somebody within Pfizer or outside Pfizer this is very well tested undocumented package but yeah the validation question like I was trying to dodge the bullet what are the biggest challenges you have faced internally and externally at Pfizer to gain traction for our adoption well it's a it's also a very loaded question I think in the times of change when industry is like has done something for like 10, 20 plus years or a certain language and there are a lot of people who are like great developers in this particular language and then now the industry is like moving towards this new and exciting and shiny things and the are and I guess shiny changes so fast and the capabilities like they like they change so fast so quickly and especially in big companies they might move a little bit less than quick this is one of the biggest challenges I guess to get like maybe everyone on board with this but so far I think our management was very receptive to change towards R so I think this is great however it's always important to remember that when people working on certain projects they have certain deadlines and deliverables it is very hard to start learning new thing and like simultaneously plug in those like new knowledge into the things you're working towards so I guess the overall like business and commitments to certain projects also can be an obstacle but I think it will change pretty soon oh and the one thing I kind of like on the back of my mind I was thinking about validation one thing also worth plugging in here is that our validation hub initiative like overall initiative specifically I think our package repository initiative that is kind of like started last year I think it's a great initiative when it comes to like our validation in general so yeah just wanted to make this plug so I'm not dodging the bullet this question like completely do you have any tips for reducing friction for the adoption of R for new packages for example tidyverse can be scary to our users who started before R3 okay so this is an interesting question because like there's this debate of like when you're a new R user should you just start from base R or just start using tidyverse and this is one of our hand hangout questions regarding this like when do when you start teaching R or learning R what do you what do you do do base R or tidyverse so when we talk about the actual like tidyverse um an adoption of R I think it has a little lower maybe like entry point to studying tidyverse just because of how much great literature I came across when actually like doing the book like even R for data science book it starts with like it is very very beginner friendly and it has great exercises and it has great community online even if none of your co-workers are doing R you can just go to the online community and there are certain GitHub repositories that have the exercises solved and explained how they were solved so I think the just like building the community support will help to reduce the this friction maybe of R adoptions that you are talking about because knowing that you are not alone having calls to ask questions um you know watching those YouTube videos just like having all this infrastructure in place is very helpful and pointing colleagues to the right resources and uh writing books I think would be helpful hope that helps in which fields does Pfizer use R clinical trial marketing finance other R user groups cross topic yes I um so I know they use it in supply chain they do use it in finance or I should say they might use it in finance I'm sure there are like pockets of Pfizer that I'm not aware that are using R I know that people at Pfizer even use Julia and I never met those people and I'm not sure what they're using Julia for but they do use Julia so I'm sure R is used like across variety we do have questions like when we get questions in our you know in Microsoft teams they're coming from like all different parts of organizations they're coming from pharmacometrics they coming from um people like I mentioned supply chain from statistics and data sciences department it's just a big variety of people I since Pfizer has like 70 000 people I might not even know all of these people and I have to like look at their little bubbles to see what departments they're working on and they also this is also used in like early clinical development so yeah R is used in a lot of different departments what are you excited about for the future of our community at Pfizer so I'm excited for it to grow actually like I think we can do better 1100 I think we can do 12 like you know 12 21 3100 I'm down for it to grow and I really want people to get comfortable with like as I said in the presentation like more not only answering like asking but answering questions so I'm excited to grow this community I really want people to connect with each other especially on different projects and different topics I'm really excited about adopting new tools um they're great developments in the open source community that are very worth uh to look at and maybe potentially working on the projects that we can open source and you know show the the world we're working on I have this uh business or IT I don't think it's a question but I choose no I'm just kidding I don't know it's probably someone's comment about something have you been able to quantitatively demonstrate the R adoption benefits for Pfizer revenue market segmentation etc great question anonymous that's indeed I was like saving it for the end because it's a tough one so everyone know quantitative benefits are very hard to measure um and I've tried to do that in some of my you know previous um working on some previous projects like I was trying to like calculate the amount of time I spend on certain things and then the amount of time it would have taken taken um for example medical monitor to do that and then like you know trying to figure out who gets paid what and like how much money the company so it is it is very hard one thing um we can do is um we can see what processes we automate and then see how much time it actually like I said took that department like if it takes you a couple of hours um a year maybe it's not worth it but if somebody's spending like two hours a week or a day on certain report and then you can just do it with one click or do the automation completely then it definitely saves time so what we do we make sure we document all our kind of like accomplishments and all projects that we as a team worked on and then we can give it to managers the managers of our managers and some of them um can have wanted to um demonstration some of them only like walleted it for now but we're in our early steps early journey so yeah I limited that anonymous attendee said I switched from tidyverse to data table last year and I will never look back good for you anonymous attendee good for you there's no open questions and see any