What is it about?
Pharmaceutical projects operate in a demanding environment involving strict regulation, long development cycles and multidisciplinary teams. We examined how project managers, stakeholder engagement and team communication are associated with three different outcomes: the achievement of project goals, benefits for end users and commercial success. Survey evidence from 111 professionals working in Greek pharmaceutical companies showed that project managers, stakeholder engagement and clear communication were positively associated with project success. Project managers were also linked to greater end-user benefits and commercial success. However, meeting project goals alone was not directly associated with commercial success. Instead, the connection ran through the benefits delivered to end users. End-user benefits therefore acted as the bridge between successful project delivery and business performance.
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Why is it important?
Project success is often judged by whether a project finishes on time, within budget and according to specifications. Our findings show that this view is incomplete, especially in pharmaceuticals. A technically well-delivered project may still fail to create business value if patients, healthcare professionals or other users do not experience meaningful benefits. Pharmaceutical companies should therefore combine strong project leadership, stakeholder involvement and clear communication with continued attention to user needs. The results suggest that end-user value is the mechanism through which successful project delivery becomes commercial success. This gives firms a practical reason to incorporate user feedback, benefit measurement and market relevance throughout the project lifecycle, rather than treating them as final-stage checks.
Perspectives
We began this study because pharmaceutical project success is still often reduced to the traditional measures of time, cost and scope. We wanted to examine a broader question: what helps technically successful projects also deliver value to users and the business? The most striking finding was that achieving project goals was not directly associated with commercial success; its relationship with commercial outcomes ran entirely through end-user benefits. Project managers, by contrast, were linked to commercial success both directly and indirectly through the benefits delivered to end users. For us, this reinforces a simple but important message: completing the project is not the final destination. Pharmaceutical projects create lasting value when strong leadership, stakeholder engagement and communication remain focused on the people who ultimately use and benefit from the outcome.
Dr. Xenia J. Mamakou
Athens University of Economics and Business
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Project Success in the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Critical Role of Managers, Stakeholders, and Communication, Procedia Computer Science, January 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2026.03.132.
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