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Relational data bases are usually sufficient for this purpose, and networking capability is not essential. |
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The system requirements for multiproject management within departments are very different depending on the amount and complexity of data and the number and geographical distribution of data entry points. Therefore, it does not seem feasible or even desirable to cover the needs of all development departments with a single system. However, access to the data should be provided to project managers and others needing them for their work with a similar user-friendly surface. |
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3.
Management Information Systems. |
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Management needs information on project plans, status, and progress at an upper, condensed level. Typically, this is the level of milestones, general and specifically defined decision points, and time-critical activities. Such data should be kept in a data base easily accessible to all members of a defined group of managers. |
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The three-level project planning and tracking system described above represents the reality in many pharmaceutical companies today. Obviously identical work packages are documented redundantly in separate systems with the need to duplicate and harmonize data entry. This may seem odd in today's age of advanced data processing. Ideally all of the tasks described above would be handled by a single system requiring the entry of each event only once. The reality, however, has shown that such integrated systems would make too many compromises on user requirements or be extremely difficult to handle. Many such projects have been unsuccessful because they could only partially replace parallel data banks with the same data. Today the trend is to compatibility of data banks allowing different applications to work with their data. In such a system, plan and actual dates of work packages would be downloaded from the departmental multiproject systems into the project manager's network system, and milestones and decision points uploaded into the management information system. Ideally, the system would provide the project manager with comparison lists for the data from the different sources with the possibility to mark the intended up- and down-loads. Such a system would reflect the reality of a large working organization, where differences in information and planning will not be avoided. They would, however, be rapidly detected and acted upon. It is hoped that rapid software development will make such solutions possible |
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