“Why do I have to keep updating the stakeholders? I just sent them a progress report a few days ago and nothing has changed…,” a question project managers ask themselves all too often.
Obviously, the stakeholders have invested a significant portion of money into the development of the new drug and he/she is always in a state of worry about whether and when they will see a return on investment. They want to ensure that their money is working for them in the most efficient manner possible and on a timeline that suits them.
In many pharmaceutical companies, there is no real standard for tracking the progress of a project. Some may still be relying on, sometimes forcibly, repurposed software that was not designed to track such an intricate process like an NDA. This results in the company or its staff to have to supplement these programs with spreadsheets or other retail software in order to “fill in the data or functionality gaps.”
With the executives/stakeholders really only interested in seeing overview progress statuses and budgetary data, they may become frustrated or overwhelmed with the reports that are available to them. Additionally, they will become frustrated at how long and how much it costs to generate an updated report. As a result, they find their day spent hounding the Project Manager (PM) for progress reports directly and frequently in order to avoid sifting through the stacks of data and jargon contained in status reports, which requires the PM to pause ensuring progress to personally report on progress.
To eliminate this “distraction” for the PM and frustration for the executives, there should be a single location where work is completed, which automatically feeds into and updates the key reports you need to review. And because all stakeholders are looking at the same reports on the same dashboard, they are more informed, can be updated when they have an itch, and free up the project manager to make sure progress is being made.
Executives must have the ability to track the project on a “broad brushstroke” overview perspective and on a task-by-task level of granularity, if so desired. They must be able to access this data on their own with little or no more effort than checking into the work management system.
Contact us to learn more about how we see executive dashboard evolving.