The success of any project depends on various issues like completing the project in time and budget with quality, satisfying the customer. Though begun slowly, pharmaceutical industry has been aggressively implementing project management practices to handle projects systematically and in a goal-oriented manner. This study focuses on pharmaceutical projects and their delays. The progress of a number of real-world pharmaceutical projects is studied. The paper examines the accomplishment of service levels in terms of time from the perspective of internal project stakeholders. It attempts to investigate the causes for delays and the remedies for rectification. A framework is developed for the successful completion of projects in time.

Every project has its own objectives, estimates of time and cost, and milestones at different stages in its life cycle. Its success is measured against its overall objectives. Service level of projects is a measurement of performance of the project in achieving its specified objectives and goals. It can be expressed as a percentage of completion of project in time, or in budget or level of satisfying the customer. The project takes into account a number of constraints related to time, cost and resources. Escalations in time or budget or expectations of project stakeholders hamper the planned progress of projects and lead to either delays or overrunning of budget. To overcome the delays, if more resources are deployed, there would be escalations in cost. To overcome the cost escalations, the scope of the project, resources and the time-duration should be fixed. If any one of them is extended, there would be delays in the project, which may lead to escalation of budget. Time-related issues are becoming central in project management (Tukel and Rom, 1998). The project work is attributed with time pressure as an important feature (Nordqvist et al., 2004).

These challenges are also common in pharmaceutical industry, which has been gradually and aggressively implementing the project management concepts and techniques. Pharmaceutical industry is one of those sectors in which most rapid changes in project management are occurring and will surpass other sectors in their ability to use project management as a vehicle for risk assessment. Pharmaceutical industry falls under medium level of project management training with 5-10 years of project management experience, and pharmaceutical organizations deal with hybrid projects, which are not predominantly project-driven but include several divisions that are project-driven (Kerzner, 2004). According to Portes (2005), pharmaceutical projects have hundreds of written Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for manufacturing operations and the controls of those operations, and no two projects are ever alike and even two projects to manufacture the same pharmaceutical dosage in two facilities will always be different. The pharmaceutical companies are having their own strategies to identify the reasons behind the delays and implement the right solutions to bring back the projects on right track by completing them in time. Even though they implemented their strategies, there were still delays reported in some projects.

This paper studies a good number of projects in some big pharmaceutical companies in India, including delayed and timely completed projects. It analyzes the reasons behind the delays and attempts to come out with some remedies to bring back the projects on right track.

Operations Management Journal, Relative Efficiencies of Schools, Data Envelopment Analysis, Government-Aided Schools, Linear Programming Model, Decision-Making Units, Organizational Units, Human Resources, Public Procurement Sectors, Government Schools, Education System.