Project Management is the Key to an Organization’s Success

Written by: Ryan Cox – Business Development Associate I

Are you wondering if Project Management is necessary? Well, with effective Project Management you can ensure that you will not be wasting time, resources, and budgets ever again because your projects are being run incorrectly.  

Project Management is an important tool in any industry. Projects are the organizations way to realize their strategic objectives. Organizations want to implement their goals and strategies but sometimes struggle to do so on their own. The best way to ensure you achieve your goals is to have a Project Manager successfully run the project, ultimately enabling you to realize your strategic initiatives. PSC’s Project Managers accomplish this by working closely with clients throughout the entire Project Life Cycle, to ensure the project is completed successfully, on time, and within budget. 

An effective Project Manager gives you a tremendous opportunity to increase efficiency in both time and resources. A Project Manager ensures that project teams are following a standardized, well thought-out, methodical approach. When your company has standardized Project Management methodology, if a team member leaves a project you can quickly onboard a replacement to fill that gap. Not only does it become easier to fill gaps within projects, but it allows for project continuity in your planning and execution with direction and focus. Your Project Manager ensures you are looking at all the critical aspects of the project, the Scope, Budget, Schedule, and Risk. Your Team, Quality, and Stakeholders all have the tools for your project to succeed. When projects succeed, organizations do too. 

As PSC Biotech Follows the Project Management Institute’s Best Practices and ISPE’s Good Practice Guide, PSC Biotech has been providing clients in a variety of industries with superior Project Management services. We not only focus on delivering successful projects, but also on creating solutions for the future. Contact PSC Biotech today to learn more about how our skilled Project Management team can help you complete current or upcoming projects to the highest standard on time and within budget. 

Process Improvements Can be Big or Small and Are Essential to Your Culture 

Written by: Crystal Booth, M.M.- Regional Manager, Southeast USA at PSC Biotech™

When we think of process improvements, it is often easiest to pick the easy quick wins to keep our management happy (e.g. low hanging fruit). However, the real question should be “Why do we have these easy wins?”. The continual improvement process (CIP) is an ongoing effort to improve products or processes. It works best when every employee feels empowered to recommend and implement changes, no matter how small.

Tools such as Kaizen, Toyota Kata, and PDCA (plan, do, check, act), can help your organization implement continual improvements. Small incremental changes can come from the employees themselves and can make them feel engaged with the company processes. Small incremental changes that are continuous over time can be easier to implement and may not require a capital investment.

One example of an incremental change involves environmental monitoring employees spending about an hour each day gowning, degowning, sanitizing supplies and carts to go into clean areas. The employees would prepare a cart with the supplies, push it down to the clean area. In the pass thru, the employees would methodically remove all the supplies from the cart, disinfect the carts, the cartwheels, and supplies. Then, they would push the cart over the demarcation line, gown in, and retrieve the cart on the other side. The employees would repeat this process until they were at the inner core of the cleanroom (4 times) and then would work their way out of the clean area sampling the environment as the progressed.

An employee had a great idea and approached management about a small change. They could save time, effort, and increase efficiency if they had cleanroom dedicated carts. The carts would be a one-time investment and would be labeled and staged for environmental monitoring use only (Plan). The carts were purchased, cleaned, and staged in the clean areas (Do). During the next cycle of environmental monitoring, the employees were timed and monitored. They pushed the loaded carts down to the clean area and began the process of disinfecting and transferring the materials into the clean area with dedicated carts. They gowned in and proceeded as normal. They saved 10 minutes at each transition every day (40 minutes a day) for a week (Check). This added a little over 3 hours of extra time per environmental monitoring employee per week, thus saving the company money and giving the employees more capacity for other projects. This small incremental change was so successful, it was implemented into the routine process (Act).

There are thousands of examples of employees suggesting “obvious” changes that allow them to be more productive and produce a higher quality product. Process improvements can be big or small projects. They require input and buy-in from the CEO to the front desk.

Need help building your roadmap for your continual improvement process? PSC Biotech™ provides custom fit options to help companies with process improvements. Experienced consultants are available to teach you the tools for process improvements so that the concepts of continual improvement can become ingrained in your culture.

PSC Biotech™ has a wide variety of solutions to ensure success for any size company. Some of our offerings include consulting, performing risk assessments, writing standard operating procedures, writing protocols, writing white papers, project management or even executing projects to free up your company’s valuable resources. Whatever your need may be in the life science industry, PSC Biotech™ will be there to help. Give us a call today!

By: Priscilla Jones, Talent Acquisition Specialist, PSC Biotech Corporation  

What is Read and Understanding Training? 

Anyone who has worked in a procedure governed organization is very familiar with “read and understand” training. “Read and understand” training typically involve reading a document and then signing an acknowledgement statement to document understanding. For many years, this was good enough to show training records as evidence of trained employees. Then regulatory inspectors started asking about the effectiveness of these training programs, so sometimes quizzes were added at the end as a way to measure knowledge retention and comprehension of the information. But the quiz is still no guarantee that the employee retained the information and turned it into a skill that can be performed on the job.  

Why is it Problematic? 

This technique can provide organizations with a quick and inexpensive way to share information with their employees, but it can also be problematic because many employees don’t recall the information accurately. This lack of recall can be due to various factors including: 

• Employees are not actually reading the document 
• Employees are just scanning the document, rather than thoroughly reading it 
• There are issues with the document itself and the key information is not apparent to employees 
• This technique does not necessarily give employees the means to feel confident completing tasks in the documents on the job 

What is the Solution? 

Read and understand courses may not be the ideal method for training employees, but many organizations rely on them in some form to train their employees. So how can those who create “read and understand” courses make them more effective and help ensure employees remember the information they just read? The solution: enhancement and engagement from the employee. Creating and incorporating interactive content into a read and understand course can provide organizations with more effective training. 

An interactive summary will enhance the read and understand course, as well as recall and retention, by walking the employees through the content and technique before they sign off on the document. An interactive quiz can be even more effective, as this allows the employee to recall the information and apply the knowledge based on the training content.  

That will help with recall and retention of the information, but is this technique effective in training employees? As a means of accessing information, yes. But reading a procedure is not the same thing as training on an SOP. Training is gaining the knowledge and skill of a technique, putting them together with practice, and applying both on the job. Training can be considered effective and successful when these procedures or techniques can be accurately performed on the job without coaching.