| Dr Georg A Mathis of Appletree Ltd goes in search of the secret to successful pharmaceutical project management
According to Peter Drucker, “The project leader is like the conductor of a symphony, who does not possess all the competences needed to fulfil the needs of the audience, but is none the less in charge of fulfilling these needs.” Being commonly defined as a series of parallel and/or sequential activities designed to reach a pre-defined objective, with a defined start and end point, a project is allocated and makes use of a variety of resources, and requires extensive coordinative action.
A PROJECT IS NOT A PROJECT
In different contexts, projects may have very different features. Project management was created in the construction industry in the middle of the twentieth century by engineers who realised that a special competence was required to bring together at the right time and place the many parties contributing to a construction site. Project management was developed to perfection by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in its drive to put man on the moon.
It is also widely used in the information technology environment and, last but not least, in the pharmaceutical industry. However, there is a significant difference between a pharmaceutical industry project and, say, a construction project.
While a construction project is normally run top down along the established lines of report and control (that is, the project responsibilities and the line leadership responsibilities overlap), a project in the pharmaceutical industry is usually organised in a matrix – along lines of report and control different from the established hierarchy (see Figure 1a and 1b). |
