Being held back by operational challenges? You might be surprised how much difference improved resource management can make to your CRO.
Pharmaceutical companies rely on Clinical Research Organizations to test and solve challenges in bringing innovative healthcare products to the market. But it's far from simple. A shocking 90% of clinical drug trials fail to bring a new product to market.
Fortunately, this isn’t a reflection on the work of CROs. There are many reasons that studies don’t bear fruit, from regulatory hurdles and efficacy issues, and even these ‘failures’ provide valuable data to build back better.
However, certain challenges CROs face could undermine the efficacy of clinical trials if they’re not properly managed. This isn’t just bad news for the CRO and its clients but also the patients who rely on these projects to ensure new therapies are safe, effective, and ready for use.
One major challenge to CRO success is this: how to manage your expert team to deliver studies on time, on budget, and to rigorous regulatory standards. Thankfully, resource management is here to help.
Resource management is a challenge for CROs, but it’s essential to master. CROs rely on multiple teams of experts to help develop safe and effective products.
Whether a clinician, researcher, manager, coordinator, or analyst, each resource needs to be assigned to projects and tasks where their expertise makes an impact. No wasted time. No wasted talent. Just expertise applied in the most time and cost-efficient way possible to get reliable results. Otherwise, you might miss immovable trial deadlines or go over budget – which can be disastrous.
Managing resources seems simple enough, but it can be deceptively difficult. Here’s why.
However, these issues can all be overcome with effective resource management processes and systems.
Employee expense, staff scheduling, skills visibility, project profitability… These are just some of the pain points CROs face when trying to maximize business success.
These compounding factors that impact success depend on using time and talent effectively. This is the goal of resource management.
And as awareness of the strategic function of resource management grows, more CROs are realizing that it is the answer to many of their operational challenges.
Let’s explore how.
CRO projects are resource intensive. They rely on highly skilled professionals in research, data management, clinical skills, and more. Their time is valuable, and expensive.
For CROs to get the best return on their investment in expertise, they need to ensure resources are used to optimum capacity.
That’s not the same as maximum capacity – 100% capacity utilization is a bad idea. It’s about providing people with the correct amount of work to earn money for the business without burning them out.
The solution is to monitor and optimize your resource utilization rate. Often expressed as a percentage, a resource utilization rate shows how much of someone’s capacity is being used
Best practice is to schedule resources to about 85% capacity overall. This leaves them 15% of their time for day-to-day life, like interruptions and unexpected tasks.
Then, within that workload, about 85% should be billable time. This leaves the rest of their time for valuable but non-billable work like training sessions and meetings.
Ensuring optimal resource utilization can help maximize project profitability by making sure that personnel costs don't get out of control.
Track utilization rates and billable utilization to ensure resources are working to an optimal level – balancing costs, return, and wellbeing.
Heatmaps are especially useful here because they show capacity and utilization at-a-glance, making it easy to monitor risks and opportunities. This helps CROs proactively manage workloads to ensure financial and operational efficiency.
Clinical trials typically have strict deadlines dictated by customer expectations and regulatory requirements. A delay at any phase of a study can have negative knock-on effects for the rest of the timeline.
For a CRO, delays and missed deadlines simply aren’t an option. But resource availability can impact a CRO’s ability to meet study schedules. It’s essential you have the right people in the right place at the right time.
Resource risk is when staff or skills gaps put a project in jeopardy. CROs need to anticipate and mitigate resource risk if they want to meet exacting trial timelines. To do this, you need the ability to map resource availability to projected workload.
This helps you spot bottlenecks and resource constraints ahead of time, so you can proactively address them before they derail a trial.
You’ll need data on staff, skills, capacity, allocations and availability, as well as your trial schedule, work breakdown, and resource requirements. A resource management platform lets CROs plan and view project schedules and resource availability in one place.
For project managers: As project managers assign resources to trials, they can immediately see if that pushes someone over capacity, putting both the project and the person at risk. They can then make informed strategic decisions about how best to proceed, whether that’s choosing an alternative resource or putting in a recruitment request.
For leaders: This information is available at project, program and portfolio levels, so leaders can see an organizational level view of capacity and understand resourcing risk across the entire business. Heatmaps and reports provide critical insights into trends, such as roles or skills in high demand and short supply, to inform workforce planning, so your CRO can always meet demanding deadlines.
When your business model is based on giving clients access to world-class research talent, you have to be able to deliver. However, many CROs struggle with poor resource and skills visibility.
They don’t know who they have, what skills are available, or whether those people have the capacity to take on work. This threatens both project outcomes and their reputation for successful delivery.
Poor visibility happens when information is decentralized – stored in different departments – or in a system that makes it hard to find the information you need (we’re looking at you, spreadsheets!)
Learn more: Resource Management in Excel Isn't Sustainable. Here's Why ➡️
This problem is even more challenging in multinational CROs with a global network of experts and employees. Ensuring the right people are assigned to the right projects at the right time becomes even more difficult when they’re off-site, out of sight, and in different time zones.
With decentralized resources and cross-functional teams, centralized resource management is a must. This means having a single platform containing essential information about every resource, regardless of where in the world they work.
A centralized resource pool increases visibility into resources, skills, capacity, availability, cost, and more. This information allows project and resource managers to identify and allocate the most relevant resources to every project, also known as talent discoverability.
You’ll need a platform or system for storing and accessing resource information – like a resource management platform – then you’ll need to get your resource data into it.
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You may need to collect that information from scratch – for example, by surveying staff – or you may already have it available, scattered around the business. It should include:
Once you have the data assembled, you should be able to upload a CSV file to your RM platform to create comprehensive, searchable staff profiles. Don’t worry. A good software partner will be able to support you through the implementation process.
Clinical trials require long-term planning across multiple phases, and that alone is challenging for CROs. Projects can evolve, regulations can change, and best laid plans can be laid to waste.
This isn’t just a problem for projects you already have in hand. It also impacts your ability to confidently pitch for new business and take on additional trials.
Without proper resource and capacity planning, CROs risk being understaffed at key times, which can disrupt timelines or increase costs through use of contractors and last minute hires.
CROs need to be proactive about their resource needs – both for in-flight and future work. But how can you prepare for something so unpredictable? Two activities – scenario planning and demand forecasting.
Scenario planning is when you model different scenarios that could pan out. For example, Trial 1 overruns, Trial 2 doesn’t progress to Phase 3…
By modelling these alternative, likely scenarios, you can understand how they’ll impact resourcing and plan accordingly.
Then, if and when these scenarios come to pass, you’re ready to pivot, rather than reactively scrabbling to mitigate resource risks.
Demand forecasting is concerned with data analysis – using past data and current insights to predict resource demand more accurately. For example, looking at:
With an appropriate resource management system, CROs have the data and tools they need at their fingertips. We’ve got articles on how to conduct a scenario analysis using Runn as well as why scenario planning is so useful.
But an often overlooked part of this process is building relationships. To accurately forecast future demand, for example, CROs need a strong understanding of the sales pipeline. And to optimize the projects they sell, the sales team needs to understand resource and skills capacity.
To achieve this shared understanding and open communication, CROs should consider interlock meetings that bring all relevant stakeholders together to discuss the impact of resourcing on project and business success.
For CROs, resource data is the foundation for all operational decisions, from project timelines to hiring plans. But if that data is incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent, it erodes trust and introduces risk.
You can’t schedule people confidently if you don’t know their true availability. You can’t plan upcoming work if your current utilization data is off. And you definitely can’t forecast future capacity if your inputs are riddled with guesswork or inconsistencies.
The result? Misallocations, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. Teams scramble to react rather than operate from a position of control and foresight.
To regain trust in resource data, CROs need a reliable system and a consistent process.
A centralized resource management platform becomes the single source of truth. No more spreadsheets floating around or information living in siloed tools. Everyone’s working from the same data, which dramatically improves alignment and decision-making.
But technology alone isn’t the fix. You also need a uniform, organization-wide process for inputting and updating data. This includes clearly defined responsibilities around:
Building trust in your data starts with good tooling, yes — but it’s sustained through behavior. CROs need to cultivate data discipline across their organization.
That means regular review cycles to ensure data remains current, clear accountability for who owns what, and a strong emphasis on data accuracy as part of company culture.
By combining the right system with the right process, CROs can unlock confidence in their data. And with that confidence comes better planning, better execution, and better outcomes.
Runn is an invaluable resource management platform for CROs. It offers actionable, at-a-glance insights for leaders and practical tools for operational managers.
