Introduction
A project may well be recording metrics right now. For example, the numbers of patients that have entered a clinical study to date relative to predicted numbers. This is critical information, however it is indicative of progress of the project and doesn’t address the effectiveness of project management.
Additionally you may well be regularly recording when the delivery of various work packages happens compared to the expectations in the plan. Also money expended to date compared to forecast. These are critical data items and they may be indicative of project management effectiveness but equally they may simply reflects the efficiency of the various functional disciplines that participate in the project. Either way they are lagging measures focusing on past activity. Critically they may not generate information that helps you to adapt and adjust your activities to ensure future success.
What’s our plan?
In recent months we have assembled a group of project management experts from the PIPMG community and beyond.
Our aim has been to define a more rounded and inclusive set of metrics that:
- Will assess the effectiveness of project management
- Will be entirely relevant to the culture of project management in the Pharma/Biotech/Life science sector
- Will be meaningful – indicators of significant and relevant performance and measurable – things that can be graded / assessed with numerical values and some text
- Will be scalable – where a set used by one organisation could be extremely top level, simple, very quick to complete – and that used by another organisation could feature more depth. Also a project manager could complete data entry themselves but also involve their team members.
Participants in our data collection pilot will be given access to these metrics. See here for more information about the pilot.