Name: Heidi Noer Troelsen
Age: 42
Education: Laboratory Technician, Steins Laboratory, 1982
Joined NNIT: 2000
Career at NNIT: project manager
Position: head of NNIT’s Quality Management
I love chaos!
”I love it when I don’t know what tomorrow or the next stage will bring”. At first glance, this seems to be a rather unexpected statement from the head of a quality department whose primary task is to systematise everything and check that rules are made and followed to the letter. Then again…
Loving chaos is the perfect precondition for being able to view the big picture and knock it into shape. Especially if this approach is combined with a hard-as-nails project manager gene and a near fetish for yellow Post-It notes! Heidi happens to possess this unique combination, and since 2004 she has been using it to make NNIT’s Quality Management department a smooth-running machine with a staff of 11 highly competent people.
Heidi joined Novo Nordisk as a laboratory technician back in 1994. Then one day, she discovered that she was allergic to her work – literally. She was diagnosed a shaving enzyme allergy, which meant that she had to rethink her career, as her condition meant a definitive farewell to life in the laboratory.
The way forward proved to be IT, which at that time was just becoming ’hot’. The dark and mysterious world of DOS drew Heidi in, and her interest led her to the Novo.Nordisk IT department, where she found herself in the middle of a group of 20 Compaq developers working to support Novo Nordisk’s document management system.
The environment gave IT a permanent place in Heidi’s heart, and she discovered that she actually thrived on documenting IT systems and getting them to work.
In 2000, this directed her towards a position as project manager at NNIT, working on a project for Ferring, NNIT’s first ever customer outside the Novo Nordisk Group. Her role here was to handle a conversion process from one document management system to another.
This assignment brought many more in its wake, with supporting roles as a consultant and sales operative. Heidi was instrumental in NNIT’s decision to take over some of Nycomed’s employees in connection with the outsourcing of this company’s data management function.
This laid the foundations for a growing business area for NNIT. “I love to optimise the utilisation of existing resources by ‘throwing things into the air’ and letting them land in new places,” says Heidi.
And this is one of the qualities that brought her to Quality Management. One of the largest tasks here has to do with auditing; making sure that NNIT lives up to the stringent requirements made by authorities such as the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) in the United States. NNIT has to observe such regulations when delivering IT services to pharmaceutical companies.
In.addition, Quality Management applies the same standards when auditing NNIT’s own suppliers to
ensure that they, too, become part of the ’FDA food chain’. “When the FDA announces a visit, we have to be ready. There is simply no understanding for chaos or the smallest deviation,” concludes Heidi.
