Power to the project manager
pharmafile | July 14, 2010 | Feature | Research and Development | Les Rose, project management
It’s an interesting exercise to peruse the job ads these days, even if you are not actually looking for a job, and particularly if you cast your eye over vacancies for project managers in industries such as engineering or construction.
My impression is that project managers in other industries command similar pay to pharmaceutical project managers, despite mostly having lower academic qualifications. Contract rates for IT project managers average out at about £450 per day, the level commonly offered by pharma companies seeking highly experienced clinical project managers. So what we perceive as a top rate may be average elsewhere.
A clinical project manager might manage a single phase III study costing £10 million, which is comparable to many in the construction industry projects. So why do engineering project managers do better materially than the pharmaceutical ones. A clue may I think be found in other ways in which these managers are managed. But let’s consider what a project manager is first.
The tenacity of the project manager
“What do you do all day?” my wife asked me once. I replied “I seem to spend most of my time badgering people”. Of course, it’s more complex than that, but my slightly caustic reply reflected what I was doing at the time. A lot of effort went into negotiating a plan with a team of internal specialists and various contractors, and my day seemed to consist of chasing people up and asking them “Have you done this?”, “Will you deliver this on time?”, and “Your deadline has passed and I have not heard anything from you”. Plus many others in a similar vein of course. This highlights important personal qualities of a project manager – of tenacity and persistence under pressure. It is behaviour that can be learned, although some are born tenacious and have a head start.
But all the tenacity in the world will not get people to do something they don’t believe in. Thus negotiation is called for. People are generally best left to set their own objectives, and are often tougher on themselves than their manager would be. The skill of the project manager is to ensure that what people want to do is what the project needs. Good negotiation skills should not be undervalued.
Benefits management
A current theme in project management circles is benefits management. The rule is, do nothing in the project that has no demonstrable benefit. All project team members should be getting some benefit from participating, and the manager needs to communicate this clearly at the outset. Indeed a good question is “What do you want to get out of this project?”. I suspect pharmaceutical project managers may be at a disadvantage here compared with colleagues in the ‘hard science’ industries.
These companies allow much more time for project set-up, compared with drug development. The difference seems to be substantial – maybe twice as much. Also, planning is done in more detail. Engineering and construction have been operating with extensive webs of subcontractors for much longer than we have been contracting out. The process is usually governed by a purchasing plan, which also covers all the materials and services the project needs. I have never seen such a plan for a pharmaceutical project. There is rarely enough time to write one.
I don’t think anyone in top management consciously discourages proper planning, it’s more a matter of not realising what the state of the art is. Also, there could well be a fear of planning. Don’t laugh, I have heard people openly express this! These individuals worry that more detail will generate more work. Does this explain why most people who buy project planning software do not update their plans? They are effectively using the software as an expensive way of drawing bar charts.
This compressed preparation and planning stage has an even more damaging effect. Management is also the skill forming a team from disparate people, and a project manager would ideally be able to select team members with complementary skills and personalities. The reality is of course different. Most of the time, we have the team we are given, as long as they meet the minimum requirements as defined by the regulators. There is no time to shop around for team members. Even if using a CRO, the usual course of events is for one or two potential team members (usually including the project manager) to be presented, but to be assigned others by the time the study starts.
That however is the easy part – building a cohesive team, focused on the project’s needs is more difficult. So the project manager has a team of people he/she doesn’t know, and who don’t know each other either. Somehow they have to be turned into an effective unit by the time the project starts. Yet the manager has much less time than established project management standards recommend. There are rarely opportunities for team building activities, and with members so often dispersed across the globe these days, the logistics are very difficult.
Agree objectives, don’t dictate them
Given these problems, its perhaps surprising that our R&D is as successful as it is. Project managers are perhaps performing well under difficult circumstances. My guess is that they have a more difficult job than many peers in other industries. One aspect that does make the job harder is a cultural one. In most companies for whom I have carried out contract work for, there was little understanding of the organisational needs of the project team, such as having a hand in setting their own objectives. Yet the most consistent problem in the training needs analyses I carry out is exactly that – objectives are usually dictated rather than discussed and agreed.
To be fair to the project manager, they are rarely the culprits here, as they are commonly presented with plans (protocols in the case of clinical trials) that have already been fixed by others in the organisation. This is usually because time is not built in to allow the necessary discussion of objectives.
This is part of a widespread disregard for the importance of the project manager. Examples of such attitudes are:
• Changing the terms of engagement of team members without the project manager’s agreement
• Reassigning team members to non-project work without even notifying the project manager
• Failure to communicate project cost information to the project manager
• Changing the technical requirements without including the project manager in the discussion
• Failing to ensure the project manager has all essential project documents – particularly contracts.
This is a short selection of many abuses, drawn from real life, that mitigate against project success. How are they allowed to happen?
The project manager cannot be expected to manage alone. They should be supported and nurtured by certain vital functions, and project sponsorship and governance are foremost among these. (I recommend the excellent websites of PRINCE2 and the Association for Project Management for further reading). The project manager needs someone they can turn to in order to solve problems that can’t be resolved within the project team. Examples are resource conflicts between departments and between projects, and changing priorities.
Some years ago I was assigned to a phase III clinical project that was 100% contracted out, and was impressed to find a project steering committee was planned. This fulfils the functions of what PRINCE2 would call the project board. The problem was, the parties never set it up. They struggled on with the CRO providing oversight in the form of a project director who did nothing of any real effect, and much too late on, this person was replaced by someone with some energy. But still the role of governance was misunderstood, as the new director, while technically excellent and highly professional, was involved on a daily basis with the detail level of the project. That is not governance, it is micro-management.
Governance is actually the regulation of project progress by means of pre-planned check points, plus a problem solving function if required. The bad practices I have described fall far short of project management standards.
Good management starts at the top, and in these cases, top management has not understood the cultural needs of the project team. However, the projects get done anyway, even if they are late and over budget. The chief executive then sends out congratulations for success (meant for the investors as much as the teams), quietly ignoring the fact that the whole programme could have been completed a year earlier and saved several millions of pounds. Or perhaps the chief executive has forgotten the original plan?
That question isn’t totally speculative. I have seen progress reports in which all the actual dates were the same as the planned dates. “Ah yes,” they said, “that’s because management keeps changing the planned dates”. Failing to face reality is a project crime. Surely people are promoted to seniority because of exceptional qualities, among which keeping promises would be rather important? We have seen that negotiated objectives are powerful tools, so that once they are promised team members are expected to deliver on them. This is undermined if the original promises are changed.
Power to the project manager
The classical organisational model for successful projects puts the project manager in a powerful position, with strong authority delegated to them by top management. More often, and in most industries, there is rather more reliance on influencing and negotiating, but nevertheless the pharmaceutical culture seems to be a bit different.
In general, our line managers seem to be valued more highly than project managers. Project managers have to go cap in hand to line managers for resources and budget, and there is little oversight to support the project manager. I have had situations in which line managers have overridden the project plan for no good reason, causing major delay, and there has been no arbitration function available. I think this sort of thing is ringing alarm bells in some companies, who have realised that they have undervalued their project managers for decades. GlaxoSmithKline has stated that “Projects are King”, and promised real authority for project managers.
Other companies will have to accept that the old days of recruiting prestigious scientists and physicians, making them line managers and giving them all the power, are over.
Les Rose is a freelance clinical scientist and medical writer. www.pharmavision-consulting.co.uk
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