Finding the right medical device project manager for your company means looking for someone who:
- can oversee all aspects of the project, from planning and budgeting to quality control and documentation.
- has a thorough understanding of the regulatory requirements associated with medical devices and is able to navigate their complexities.
- possesses excellent interpersonal skills to foster growth and creativity in their team.
- has a leadership style that fits the company culture, team, and project needs.
Whether interim, full time or an external consultant, your project manager must know how to optimize your company’s resources to reach project goals on time and within budget. Here are the steps to ensure that happens.
Finding The Right Medical Device Project Manager For Your Business
Step 1: Start By Creating A Spreadsheet Of Viable Candidates
Creating a spreadsheet will help you keep track of all the information you gather about potential medical device project managers for your company or project. Eventually, it will also help you score them on their attributes and determine the best medical device project manager for your project.
Besides the basic information like their name, contact details, education, and experience, you can also list important attributes necessary for your company or project.
You can also include a separate column for notes on your thoughts about each candidate.
Once the spreadsheet has been created and the columns populated, it can then be filtered, sorted, and weighed according to specific criteria.
Step 2: Define The Most Important Attributes The Potential Medical Device Project Manager Should Have
And add them in individual columns in the spreadsheet.
Here’s a list of important criteria and attributes any medical device project manager should have.
Their education
Technical? Marketing? Regulatory? Is it medical device related?
Let’s say the project manager has technical education. You need to determine the dominant technology for your project and match the project manager’s education in that. For example, catheter development would best use a mechanical or biomedical engineering degree.
Similarly, if a project manager has a marketing degree, you need to look into their specializations. Does your project require upstream marketing or downstream? Can the project manager work with what’s required? Do they have education in healthcare marketing?
What kind of regulatory education do they have? Do they have a degree in medical law? Engineering? Perhaps they have Medical Device Quality Assurance Training or Quality Assurance Management Certifications.
Whatever their education, you need to see how it translates to what you need for your medical device project.
Their experience
How closely does their experience match what’s needed for your current project? Does it match with any of the below?
- Your industry
- The technology you use for your medical device project
- Your device type
- The size of your project
- The company culture and communication style, Is your project remote or local?
Do they have experience in one of the following areas?
- Designing
- Testing
- Regulatory Clinical Studies
- Quality Systems
- Manufacturing
If yes, they’ll have a really good sense of the types of tasks that go into making a medical device product.
Their Project Management styles
Finding the right project manager for your medical device project requires you to understand the type of project, the team members, and their communication styles. By doing so, you’ll be able to select a right-fit project manager whose leadership style matches what your project needs currently.
For example, If it’s a project in trouble or has tight deadlines you need a dictator.
If there’s a lot of discovery you need a mentor, someone who works well with research.
Expansive, long-term projects require very high EQ, and a persistent, driving leadership style.
In most cases, a project manager needs to transition across roles and project management styles as needed seamlessly. They need to be the captain, manager, and cheerleader of their team, depending upon the situation at hand.
Tom Waddell
Communication
Medical device project management often involves cross-functional teams and people with different skill sets, experience levels, and talents. Plus, external stakeholders and a peer network. A skilled medical device project leader needs to know how to communicate to get the most out of everyone.
Does your project need someone who can manage both, in-house and remote teams? If remote, do you have team members in multiple time zones? If you have a very diverse team across 10 time zones, you want someone who has done this before. Similarly, if you have a team with a lot of different communication styles, you need someone who has experience dealing with large, diverse teams.
Alternatively, if you have a 10-person homogeneous team sitting in the same office you do not have to worry about that.
Step 3: Design The Interview Questions
Before you start interviewing project management candidates, you need to design your interview questions. These targeted questions should help you determine how strong a candidate is when it comes to the attributes you want them to have. So instead of asking outdated questions like what is your greatest strength/weakness, ask them questions like:
- How equipped are you to handle ‘X’ type of emergency?
- What would you do if ‘Y’ situation happens?
- How has your experience prepared you for ‘Z’?
Try asking questions that help identify their leadership and communication styles, how they handle conflict, to what degree their skills are suited for your medical device project, and so on.
You can prepare a scorecard that lists important criteria and the interview questions related to those criteria next to them.
Step 4: Interview And Score Your Candidates
When you interview your candidate, you can use the scorecard mentioned above to gain direct insight into each applicant’s capabilities and score them to make informed decisions about who should be considered for the position. The candidates can be scored between 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest) for each question based on their answers. For example:
1/5: The answer missed the point or was inadequate.
2/5: A poor answer with few good points
3/5: An average answer that included many of the desired key points
4/5: A strong answer close to what you’re looking for
5/5: An excellent answer that is exactly what you’re looking for
| Criteria/Attributes | Question | Score | Weight | Total |
| Education | Question 1 | |||
| Question 2 | ||||
| Question 3 | ||||
| Total | – | – | – | X |
| Experience | Question 1 | |||
| Question 2 | ||||
| Question 3 | ||||
| Total | – | – | – | X |
| Project Management Style | Question 1 | |||
| Question 2 | ||||
| Question 3 | ||||
| Total | – | – | – | X |
Step 5: Choose
Before determining the best medical device project manager for the job, assign a weight for each question. Weight each interview question based on what is important for your medical device project. To keep it simple, if the question is not very important you can give it a weight of 1. If it’s somewhat important, give it 2. If it’s very important, give it 3.
Once you have the score for each answer, multiply them with the weight of the question to get the total score.
Once the scoring is done for all the candidates, you can populate the spreadsheet mentioned in step one with the attributes/criteria and the final scores for each candidate.
The candidate with the best scores will get the position.
Bonus: Where To Find The Right Medical Device Project Managers To Interview And Hire For Your Medical Device Projects
Besides asking your immediate network for good recommendations, you can look for viable candidates to hire using Indeed or Glassdoor. Alternatively, you can also work with a consulting firm specializing in medical device project management, like Waddell Group.
Waddell Group works globally with medical device companies of all sizes by helping them with their project management needs. Dial 651-347-4521 or email us at [email protected] to know more.
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