The Importance Of Strong Project Controls In Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

By Jess Porter, Senior Program Manager

The hallmark of a high performing organization is the cultivation, use, and continuous improvement of their processes used to monitor and evaluate performance. As such, many organizations continue to struggle to reach a high level of performance in delivering projects, not because they don’t have project management processes, but because these processes fail to identify, track and act upon project data which indicate project health – both good and bad. Additionally, these organizations fail to use lessons learned from one project to improve their project management practices in subsequent projects.

Projects generate a multitude of data, yet in many underperforming organizations the data isn’t distilled into metrics which can then be collated into KPIs. KPIs in sum provide stakeholders a method for early indication of emerging project issues, as well as successes. Furthermore, even when used project metrics and resultant KPIs are not sufficiently broad or are misunderstood, this can hamstring the organization’s ability to implement actions that address project weaknesses or that can capitalize on successes. Another problem is that many PMs and stakeholders don’t recognize the differences between lagging KPIs and leading KPIs – those that record what has been done versus those that try to anticipate the future. Understanding and tracking essential project KPIs will help your PMs reach and maintain a higher level in project performance. Stakeholders that require their PMs to report both KPIs and resulting actions enable effective project oversight and consistency in project success.