The Essential Role of the Program Manager | Halloran Consulting

Small life science companies often need to ‘do more with less.’ Leaders of these companies must seek ways to trim costs without sacrificing quality and speed. As you build your development team, you may be tempted to forgo hiring a Program Manager, but that decision may create less-than-desirable results. 

Leaders of life science companies, especially leaders of startups, often have misconceptions about the role of a Program Manager, believing these individuals predominantly schedule meetings, take minutes, and develop timelines. Successful leaders understand a strong Program Manager can advance their product through all stages of development.  

A strong Program Manager: 

• Seeks input from functional leads to construct an integrated development plan to capture both short- and long-term goals, milestones, and inflection points 
• Advises the development team and/or leadership on strategy and best practices 
• Offers advice on “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” to reach each inflection point 
• Creates an aggressive yet realistic timeline supporting the development team and holds individual team members accountable 
• Ensures the development team is fully aligned on workstreams, dependencies, and critical pathways across projects 
• Partners with the development team to document and manage action items, decisions, risks and mitigations, and lessons learned  
• Manages vendor relationships 
• Manages and mentors the development team on optimal team composition, expectations, and effective communication 
• Facilitates communication between the development team and senior leadership by creating tools that meet an organization’s specific needs (e.g., reports, dashboards) 
• Provides creative solutions to unanticipated challenges and developmental roadblocks  
• Creates a robust organizational system to prepare for critical events (e.g., regulatory submissions and interactions and due diligence requests) 

While this list is not exhaustive, it does provide insights into how an effective Program Manager can serve as a flexible partner in reaching a company’s development goals. 

You may not be ready to hire a full-time Program Manager; however, consulting groups like Halloran offer Program Management Consultants who can leverage their experience and expertise and dedicate the time necessary to reach your development goals with maximum efficiency and in the most cost-effective manner possible.  

About Halloran’s Program Management 

An effective Program Manager brings deep experience and valuable skills to support life science companies in achieving their goals as efficiently as possible. They strategize and lead, build and execute development plans, provide tools and templates to facilitate workflows and utilize effective team management techniques throughout all stages of a company’s product and portfolio development. 

Halloran’s Program Managers define the strategy within their clients’ cross-functional teams and lead the development program through execution. Halloran’s Program Managers offer their clients a competitive advantage through their integrated insights and learnings from the development of similar types of products in the industry. 

Ready to Learn More? 

Read our Program Management case study – Turning Drug Development Chaos into Order for an NDA.   

Contact Halloran today to evaluate if Program Management consulting is right for you.