The management of strategic projects in the pharmaceutical industry in Puerto Rico

Abstract

Due to the limited time protection that a patent provides a new pharmaceutical product in the market, organizations need to be agile in launching them to maximize their return on investment and need qualified project managers to accomplish it. Competency models have been developed in the United States, which describes the required soft and hard skills that a manager must have in order to be successful in the execution of general as well as strategic projects, but is unknown if they would apply to the management of projects at the pharmaceutical industry in Puerto Rico. This research presents the competency model develop by Rodríguez (2005) and evaluates its applicability in determining the competences needed to manage projects in the pharmaceutical industry sector in Puerto Rico. Results demonstrate that the model has applicability in Puerto Rico, but the relative importance of every competency varied versus the results on the previous study, which indicates that the importance of the competencies may vary depending on the environment.