In June 2019, PMINJ placed its focus on members who work in the life sciences industry – pharma, biotech, devices and healthcare. Our ensuing Life Sciences LCI hosted its first stand-alone event on December 3, 2019: “Beyond Pills and Devices: Driving Healthcare Innovation by Embracing Project Management.”  Our evening quickly sold out due to our world-renowned project management guest speaker - John McGrath - from the Technological University Dublin, Ireland.  In his consulting work as a global Project Management Advisor, John has helped over 250 companies, government and other international enterprises improve their strategic and project management processes. During his engagement, John seamlessly wove together trends and challenges with humor and insight as to how life science project managers can ready ourselves to lead in and be strategic contributors to the impending digital transformation in healthcare.

Grabbing attention with, “People are living longer than ever before thanks to advances in healthcare, but organizations are dying faster than ever,” John drove home for all that healthcare organizations and its project managers need to embrace the reality that healthcare will change - more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 20 – with this to be driven in large part through digital technologies.

Some information John cites:

• Healthcare companies fail to fully integrate digital.
• 70% of digital healthcare projects fail to deliver their expected value.
• 95% of collected data is not used in meaningful ways.
• Digital megatrends such as Big Data, AI (artificial intelligence), IOT (internet of things) are shaping healthcare and our broader society.
• Big Data will transition to “Fast Data” to be better utilized in healthcare.
• wearables will transition to clothing with embedded sensors analyzing real-time biometrics.
• digital will not supplant clinicians, but instead provide information that enhances their expertise and ability to care for patients.

He further convinced us to look at current events - AI is being used to track and model patient data to support the world’s response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, with Google and other digital giants participating. Those tasked with managing response efforts at healthcare companies, hospitals and beyond are leading their teams to integrate outcomes from AI data analyses, and are likely using digital tools to manage these rapidly-evolving projects to accurately deliver mission-critical outcomes.  

Why should project managers in life sciences care about all this?  It is because we will soon be expected to embrace digital – with enough acumen to be able to manage its integration in our project outcomes as well as apply it through PM tools.  John’s lesson learned - healthcare organizations must seek agility to deliver before the competition - the value differentiator is how the organization delivers to its customers and market.

John further defines Project Management as the how:

• Anyone can start a project – project managers are finishers ensuring the outcome delivers value.
• Project managers drive innovation – a strategic exercise, too often considered “operational”.
• Healthcare organizations are looking for project managers that can lead and drive change.
• Many organizations don’t understand project management, but will perk up when they hear change management.  The two are symbiotic - they both focus on people.
• To be project managers that drive change and strategy, the traditional triple constraints of scope, cost and time must transition to triple constraints 4.0 of change, innovation and continuous improvement (surrounding creative people and projects).

The rapidity of change puts new demands on life science project managers – organizational needs may advance faster than our skill sets.  John challenged us to understand how we need to evolve, using any and all opportunities to educate ourselves on digital at a high level:

• Healthcare is moving from knowledge scarcity to knowledge abundance, so the essence of project management isn’t what you know but what you can do with what you know.  We need to be ready to solve the new, massive problems.
• Doing Agile is a straightforward process to a destination; Being Agile is the journey.  We need to develop a mindset of creative growth and continuous improvement.
• The most important skill in both healthcare and project management is emotional intelligence (EQ) - self-awareness, internal motivation, social skills, self-regulation, empathy.  Many think they have EQ completely covered.

Using himself as an example, John demonstrated we may not have it all (EQ), so we need to honestly evaluate what needs improvement.  The future will be collaborative intelligence (AI with human).  

What followed the presentation was a lively panel discussion with John - including Life Science LCI members Dave Dalessandro, Charles Rosen, Marion McGlynn and representatives from our event sponsors - Peniel Ortega of PharmAllies, Darragh Cunningham of Cora Systems, Michael Milutis of CAI and Venkatesan Muthukrishnan of HCL – as they further discussed the evening’s topics and how we can better ready ourselves for the oncoming future.  

John’s great surprise for the evening – copies of his PMO Roadshow magazine – Ireland’s first project management print and digital magazine – given out to all our attendees.  

Audience member feedback for continued collaborations was highly encouraging:

“excellent speaker and panel. enjoyed entire evening w/sponsors. very well done and very interesting for non-pharma PMs”
“Glad to get to know others in the life sciences”
“John McGrath was outstanding and the presentation was sensational!”

In closing, some of our own perspectives:

“The overwhelming response confirmed our belief that there is a real need for a community of learning focused on life sciences in NJ. It also marked the beginning of several relationships with corporate sponsors which will allow the LCI to plan for future events meeting the needs of the PMP community in NJ.”  Dave Dalessandro
“It really brought us together, helping professionals to network, connect and share their experiences. We need such events for us all to be relevant and successful in this marketplace.” Haresh Keshwani
“This event showed our Chapter is on the cutting edge – developing new collaborations to bring today’s emerging life science trends to help us all get ready for tomorrow”.  Claudia Campbell

A recording of the event is available on the PMINJ website on the Member Webinar page (login required). To join the Life Sciences LCI email list and for information on upcoming events, visit the Life Sciences LCI web page.