People Are the Constraint

Part of Clinical Project Management (PM) Training: Budget, Resourcing and the Cost of Delay.

About 1 minutes. Free, in your language, no account needed.

The resource that does not scale on demand

Money can sometimes be found quickly. An experienced clinical research associate who knows the indication cannot. Recruiting and training one takes months, and the trial needs them now.

Treat experienced people as the scarce resource they are, and plan around their availability rather than assuming it.

Where the strain shows first

Monitoring visits slipping. Query resolution slowing. Reports arriving later and shorter. Each of these is usually a staffing signal misread as a performance problem.

Ask how many trials the person is on before concluding they are underperforming.

Turnover is a trial risk

A monitor leaving takes site relationships and undocumented context with them. A coordinator leaving at a high-enrolling site can stop enrollment for two months.

The mitigation is unglamorous: write things down, keep site contact history in the file rather than in one person's inbox, and make sure no site depends on exactly one person on your side.

Protect the critical path

When resource is short, the question is not who is busiest. It is which activities are on the critical path. A week of effort moved onto a critical activity buys a week of trial. The same week spent on something with slack buys nothing.

Saying no to a non-critical request is part of the job, and it is easier when the critical path is written down and shared.