The basis of our interim management and project leadership is to first understand your problem and then develop a concept, a project plan and a cost estimate, as a decision base. MVLSC project leaders have comprehensive, diversified experience in the life science industry, hence we are in the position to produce practical concepts, reliable project plans and cost estimates within short time. After you decided (with our support, if you wish) the way forward, we organize staff if needed and perform our joint project to the planned time lines, quality, functionality and cost. Our project leadership and organization is transparent, goal orientated, effective, and tailored to your special situation and expectations.
At the beginning of each mandate our project manager formulates together with the customer the goal, scope, time lines, budget, functionality and targeted quality of the project (determines the User Requirement Specification, URS). Then he produces a project plan and a cost estimate in line with the URS. The customer reviews the project plan and cost estimate with assistance of our project manager and, if needed, our project manager adapts the project plan and cost estimate, and the customer approves both. Should it be necessary, we also produce a risk assessment of the project, which is a living document during the whole project. Based on the agreed plan, our project manager arranges these initial steps for the project:
- He identifies the project team (in complex projects, job descriptions may be needed),
- produces the project organization chart,
- trains the team members,
- adapts MVLSC project templates to customer needs (e.g. meeting minutes, action list, status report, project plan, risk assessment).
Next we organize a kick-off meeting, which is also a team building activity and a good opportunity for the general management to give a strong message about their support of the project and expectations. The meeting agenda is usually as follows:
- Introduce the project (goals, timelines, activities, functionality, quality).
- Introduce the team members, their tasks and goals.
- Explain the working mode and clarify questions as:
- Do we work in one team or sub-teams?
- Who is in which team with what function, responsible for what?
- When and how will we hold the working meetings?
- How to report and archive results?
- How to use the templates and where are they stored?
- How to escalate issues?
- What are the KPIs of the project, how are they measured, how is the performance of the team members measured?
- In complex, long projects with many team members a project charter may be useful, where all these details are laid down (MVLSC-template).
- Verify the alignment of all team members with the project targets.
The management process is standardized and supported by templates for the documents (simple, easy to use and understand). Our project manager leads the project, usually accompanied by a customer’s project manager.
- He organizes, participates in, leads and oversees the team meetings,
- he checks the results, identifies and remediates deviations from the plan.
- he updates the risk assessment for the project, if needed.
- he updates customer‘s project leader at least weekly, the general management at least monthly in meetings.
- he produces periodic reports for the general management (status, finished tasks, tasks to be finished in the next period, deviations to plan/budget and remediation actions, risks),
- as the project progresses, he tries to improve the project processes together with the customer’s team (project leader, team members etc.) to attain continuous improvement.
The project will normally be closed off with a final report and in a final meeting with the project team and possibly another meeting with customer’s general management.
The above describes the full MVLSC project management process. However, some customers may have prepared some items by themselves already (e.g. items 1 – 4 may already be completed, when our project manager gets involved), in which case we adapt the process.
If you are interested to download this concept as a white paper, please use the form on this page.
If you want to know about our customer’s experience with the concept, please read the references.
