Half the Time Was Just the Start: Introducing Aurora Workspaces

By Bhavish Lekh, Co-founder & CEO, Aurora Analytica

We listened to the teams using the platform. The time savings are huge, and the biggest opportunity to grow them further is in how teams work together.

I have spent my career inside clinical development, working at some of the best CROs in the industry and alongside pharma and biotech teams on hundreds of studies. If that time taught me one thing, it is this: no two teams work the same way. Same goal, same regulatory reality, same deadline pressure, and yet every team had its own way of gathering data, building a strategy, and getting a deliverable out of the door. Templates differed. Review chains differed. Even the definition of "done" differed.

It taught me a second thing too, and this one did not just frustrate me. It frustrated everyone, and it slowed everything down. A clinical development workflow pulls in far more people than most org charts admit: feasibility, medics, clinical development, project managers, business development, strategy leads, data teams, and the key decision makers who sign off along the way. Whether the trigger is an RFP landing with a one week deadline or an internal planning cycle at a sponsor, the work is deeply cross functional. Yet there was never a shared space where that collaboration could actually happen, so the work lived in separate files, separate inboxes, and separate heads. Progress depended on chasing people. You had to be very proactive, know exactly what to ask for, and ask for it early, or you found out what someone had done when the meeting started, not while you could still build on it. I lost count of the mornings I spent building something a colleague had already half built.

Both of those lessons shaped what we have just released.

Before we could measure the workflow, we had to define it

In July we published a time and motion case study with a global CRO, measuring a country ranking workflow end to end rather than cherry picking a single step. The headline was that the same work now takes less than half the time, with more capabilities and higher confidence behind it. But the more valuable outcome for us was quieter: to measure the whole workflow honestly, we first had to define it.

So we standardised it. Five steps that take you from raw data to a decision ready deliverable: Entry, Setup, Analyze & Simulate, Collaborate, Deliver. One workflow, whichever module you run. That structure now gives us a benchmark: we can test every module in the platform against it for time savings, for capability impact, and for what it does to a team's capacity. We learnt a lot from that first study, and we are open that we want more: further time savings in several steps, and a higher capability ceiling in key areas.

One number from the case study stayed with me. Every step got faster, but the smallest gain sat in one place: collaboration and fine tuning improved by 33%, the least of the five. Software can calculate faster, model faster, and produce a deliverable faster. But if your team still coordinates through attachments and status meetings, the workflow is only as optimised as its slowest conversation. Collaboration is one of the five steps, and it deserves the same seriousness as the analytics.

Workspaces, first version live today

That is why I am pleased to share that the first version of Workspaces is live today across the Aurora platform.

We have been working on Workspaces for some time, and launching it now is deliberate. With more of our core modules shipped, a shared space finally has a full workflow to wrap around, and it means we can now work on increasing time savings and capabilities across all five steps of the Aurora Workflow at once, rather than one module at a time.

A Workspace is a shared home for a study. Inside it, your team can create projects for the individual pieces of work that study generates, whether that is a country strategy, an enrolment model, or a full study strategy package. You invite the people who need to be there, across departments and functions, with member roles that control what each person can see and do. And because everything lives in one place, you finally get the visibility I spent years wishing for: who is working on what, what has changed, and where things stand, while you can still contribute.

It matters just as much at handover. Clinical development moves in stages, and when a study passes from planning into operational execution, a new team usually inherits it. In my experience, what they inherited was a folder of final documents and none of the reasoning. In a Workspace, the incoming team steps into the full picture: the projects, the decisions, and the thinking behind them, so nothing is lost between stages.

We deliberately did not build Workspaces around one rigid process, because I know from experience that a rigid process would fit almost nobody. Everyone works a bit differently, and that is not a flaw to be corrected. It is how experienced teams express their judgement. So Workspaces is made to be flexible: teams shape the structure, the membership, and the flow that suits them best, whether you sit in a CRO responding to RFPs, a sponsor planning a programme, or a lean biotech team.

See it on your own study

The five step workflow gave us a way to measure what the platform saves. Workspaces is how we make sure those savings compound across a whole team instead of stopping at one person's screen.

And watch the figures. The numbers on each of the five steps are not a final scorecard, and we will update them regularly as the modules improve, because our aim is to keep saving our customers time, not to ship and stop.

We are already building on it with the teams using it, the same way every part of the platform has been built: alongside the people doing the work. If you would like to see how a Workspace would fit the way your team already works, I would love to show you. Book a demo, or get in touch through the contact form on our website, and bring a study you know well. Those are always the best conversations.

Bhavish Lekh is the Co-founder and CEO of Aurora Analytica. Connect with him on LinkedIn or reach out at bhav@aurora-analytica.com.