What are Key Performance Indicators for a Life Sciences Project?

KPIs are a vital part of the project management office’s (PMO’s) value proposition.

At USDM Life Sciences, we help customers plan for and successfully complete a variety of projects, including operations, quality, compliance, regulation, and IT. We use KPIs to track whether business or project objectives are on track, ahead or behind, or if they have been achieved. While this seems relatively straightforward, many of our customers struggle with identifying the most critical KPIs to track and balancing that with getting the job done. Business and projects are unique, so you must start with establishing your strategic objectives or goals, deciding how you will define success, and determining how you will measure your success. With these three specifics, you can write your KPIs.

A common KPI for a life sciences project is on-time performance or project delivery where the actual time it took to complete a project is measured. After all, time is money and you most likely made a commitment as to when the project would be completed.

Other KPIs for life sciences projects include:

• Customer satisfaction, the most important indicator, and can be measured with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer satisfaction score
• Budget management and delivering on-budget without unplanned expenses
• Quality assurance and minimizing the number of issues per project
• Scope creep and ensuring the original scope of the project is accurate or that you are tracking changes
• Resources or team health KPIs can include team happiness, engagement, or job satisfaction, and the number of resources or human-hours to complete a project

KPIs for Organizational Change Management

While project management KPIs are more widely understood, it’s also important to measure your organizational change management (OCM) progress as digital transformation gains traction in the life sciences industry. OCM is critical to successful adoption and transformation in any organization.

KPIs for OCM might include:

• Tracking user adoption of a new IT system via the number of employees trained
• Reducing the number of help tickets created to learn a new system
• Tracking the volume of backlog requests or tickets to make changes to a new system or process
• Identifying downtime or service interruptions in a new IT system or application that disrupts productivity
• Increasing efficiency with a project or new system; for example, adding e-Signature software in an organization to decrease downtime.

How USDM Can Help

USDM Life Sciences project and program management experts are the perfect fit to help guide, lead, and support your life sciences organization’s mission-critical project and programs initiatives. We specialize in highly regulated areas where compliance, technology, and business intersect and attain your desired business results. Contact USDM to learn how our Project and Program Management Services and Solutions team can help you to manage your projects, your programs, and your portfolio with consistent and standardized methods, processes, and principles.