You're an early stage drug discovery and development start up and your scientists keep saying that they could sure use some support with planning and managing programmes. Or you are worried that you may lack the visibility of what is really going across your portfolio...

Truly enabling drug discovery with new technologies needs a new form of programme and portfolio management, and a wider skill set than normally assumed for these roles.

Capacity management is one of those things that are crucially important especially for rapidly growing start ups - and yet, too often there is nobody to think about this from a process perspective. Programme management can make a key contribution in identifying the impact here, but addressing (or even better, preventing) bottlenecks needs clear strategic thinking and planning.

In startups, very few people usually end up covering many quite different activities and roles. Especially in the supporting functions it can be difficult to hire people with the specific experiences that are helpful to support drug discovery and development in small and fast-growing settings. This guide is intended as a starting point to support discussions on how best to set things up.

When you first get set up, it’s just as easy to pick a bunch of different products to fulfil the needs of different parts of the business as it is to not look for a sustainable solution... and generating endless, unsustainable spreadsheets, slide decks and documents instead. Your context and use case matter - things to consider.