A Healthy Dose of Knowledge

Project managers have to do four things at once: keep the client happy, keep their colleagues happy, stay on time, and stick to budgets. It's a rare person who can do all those things. We are very serious about training our people. We are very serious about mentoring; it's not unusual for experienced project managers to spend 20% of their time advising younger project managers.

Projects also create a short-term rhythm that you have to work by. You have to keep appraising and adjusting. Every week, we have a worldwide videoconference for all our project managers. So much can happen so quickly: a client wants to accelerate a timetable by two months, a trial is generating adverse events, the FDA has questions. When issues get raised we resolve them within 48 hours. We use the weekly videoconference as a kind of sunset law. We don't change everything every week, but we do reevaluate every week.