Case Study

Published June 2008

GlaxoSmithKline: Improving Global Project Management Capability

Jacqui Alexander

Because of its operations and organizational structure, global project management is crucial for GlaxoSmithKline. The company has implemented an extensive project management training program to ensure employees around the world have this competency.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is a research-based company with a wide portfolio of pharmaceutical products across the world. Headquartered in London, it employs more than 100,000 people in 72 countries. The company has a very clear mission: to improve the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer. For GSK and its employees around the world, turning this mission into a reality requires the management of many large-scale medicine discovery and development projects that can typically run the course of a decade, involve a broad range of business units and consume vast amounts of resources.

Because of its operations and organizational structure, global project management is a major force in the organization. Joining up the different projects across the different workforces has to be as effective and streamlined as possible, not least in terms of enabling all the project team members to understand exactly what their colleagues and managers need, and do.

To that end, GSK has worked for the past five years to develop and implement project management training at every conceivable level. The training programs have been working across six sites in the United Kingdom, as well as in Italy and the United States, particularly in Philadelphia and North Carolina. Plans are in place to work similarly in other European GSK centers in France and Spain, and also in Canada.

All the training workshops are face-to-face. None of them are yet run as virtual seminars or Webinars, although GSK is developing its own e-learning program.

In 2006, GSK Research and Development (R&D) launched its iPlan initiative, a global program sponsored at the highest levels of management. The initiative sought to improve people capabilities and processes, enabling technologies and support services to deliver integrated project and portfolio planning. Key aspects of the approach include:

• Defining the planning process, responsibilities and key practices.

• Live piloting of the new processes, practices, work breakdown structures and IT enablers in various medicine development teams to learn, refine and confirm the effectiveness of the changes.

• Extensive project management education and development.

• Selecting and validating an enterprise project management system.

• Integrating project and clinical development planning.

• A targeted communication strategy to engage and build momentum for the change program.

To make this ambitious initiative a success and roll it out effectively throughout such an expansive organization, GSK leaders knew they would need help from experts in the delivery of large-scale performance improvement training in project management.

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