Case Study: Global Pharmaceutical Company Gains Drug Development Portfolio Visibility with Rego Consulting

Unified project, milestone, status, and staffing data

Clarity gives a global pharmaceutical Research Information Management (RIM) team one governed view of drug development work. Specialized systems continue to support detailed execution.

Industry: Pharmaceuticals
Company Size: Global enterprise
Primary Clarity Use: Top-down governance and reporting across a portfolio of pharmaceutical drug development projects
Engagement Scope: Fit-for-purpose Clarity model, phased implementation, governed project data, reporting, integrations, and resource plan-to-actual visibility

Key Results

  • ✓
    Delivered the minimum viable product (MVP) on schedule, with core capabilities released through a phased implementation.
  • ✓Consolidated all active and in-flight research and development projects in Clarity, creating one governed oversight view without duplicating detailed execution.
  • ✓
    Gave leadership near-real-time visibility into project status, development milestones, and changes to essential business data.
  • ✓Connected planned staffing with imported timesheet actuals, strengthening future resource-planning decisions.

The Organization: A Global Pharmaceutical Company Managing Drug Development Projects

The client is a large global pharmaceutical company that develops and brings medicines to market. Within its research organization, a project oversight team manages a complex book of work spanning drug development programs and product lifecycle stages.

The team’s role sits above day-to-day tasks, detailed work breakdown structures, and clinical trial execution. Clarity software serves as a top-down governance and reporting layer, bringing together the project status, milestone, and staffing information leaders need across the research portfolio.

This deliberate model illustrates an important strength of Clarity: the platform can give a global Research Information Management (RIM) team the oversight it needs by providing a unified view of work managed across specialized pharmaceutical systems.

The Challenge: Fragmented Data Obscured the Drug Development Portfolio

The RIM team’s research and development project data was scattered across spreadsheets and disconnected systems, making it difficult to see the full picture. Those tools supported individual activities, but leadership lacked a common source of standardized project data and could not easily assemble a consistent view of work in progress.

The fragmented approach created several business challenges:

  • Project status, lifecycle changes, and mandatory development milestones were difficult to see across the portfolio.
  • Reporting required manual effort and could vary depending on the source.
  • Inconsistent required fields made project governance and data quality harder to sustain.
  • Planned staffing allocations were not connected to the actual time worked, limiting the information available for future resource planning.

The opportunity was to create a scalable oversight layer above the specialized systems already supporting detailed work. The organization needed a single place to govern its book of projects, track significant drug development milestones , and give leaders a clearer view of progress and capacity.

The Solution: Adapt Clarity to the Team’s Oversight Role

After evaluating multiple platforms, including Planisware and Planview, the organization selected Clarity. Other areas of the global enterprise were already using Clarity, giving the project sponsor practical evidence that the platform could provide a portfolio-level view of projects and resources while working alongside the specialized systems used for pharmaceutical development.

Rego Consulting designed the implementation around the oversight team’s actual role. Rather than recreate detailed execution in Clarity, Rego focused the platform on the standardized project, milestone, status, and staffing data needed for governance and leadership reporting.

The work followed a clearly defined Crawl-Walk-Run approach.

  • Crawl: Build the Governed Oversight Foundation

    Firm guardrails kept the first phase focused on the minimum viable product.

    • Loaded the active book of research and development work into Clarity.
    • Standardized required data elements for different types of projects.
    • Established consistent practices for capturing the high-level drug development milestones used in progress tracking and leadership reporting.
    • Laid the foundation for reconciling planned staffing with timesheet actuals.
  • Walk: Connect the Signals Leaders Need

    A flexible second-phase backlog allowed Rego and the client to address the highest-value priorities as needs evolved.

    • Imported timesheet actuals from an external system on a biweekly cycle to show who was working on each project in practice.
    • Imported milestone data from external systems and expanded milestone tracking across a larger set of projects.
    • Introduced Clarity’s out-of-the-box status reports and automated email notifications for changes in project status and other essential business data.
    • Prioritized enhancements incrementally so the implementation could respond to changing business needs without losing its core direction.

  • Run: Extend Context and Portfolio-Level Insight
    At the time of this case study, the organization was completing the Walk phase and preparing for Run. Planned work includes:

    • Importing legacy project data.
    • Expanding near-real-time reporting through Clarity’s Modern User Experience (MUX).

The Results: A Fit-for-Purpose View of Drug Development Work

With the first two phases in place, Clarity now operates as a portfolio-level lens across active and in-flight research and development projects. It captures the information required for governance and leadership decisions without asking the oversight team to manage every underlying activity on the platform.

The client reported:

✓ Significantly greater visibility across the drug development portfolio.
✓ More streamlined business processes and reporting.
✓ Strong user engagement, with teams finding practical value in the portfolio-level approach.

Business Outcomes

  • Fit-for-purpose oversight across systems: Clarity provides a governed view across the project portfolio while specialized systems continue supporting detailed pharmaceutical execution.

  • More consistent drug development project governance: Standardized data and milestone practices support stronger adherence to project management office expectations across different project stages.

  • Simpler reporting and faster awareness: Clarity status reports, refreshed portfolio data, and automated notifications reduce the effort required to identify important changes.

  • Better resource-planning insight: Combining planned staffing allocations with imported timesheet actuals helps leaders understand who is working on which projects and plan future work using a more complete evidence base.

Strategic Impact: By configuring Clarity around the team’s distinct oversight role, Rego created a scalable foundation for visibility, governance, and resource insight without duplicating specialized execution systems. The result demonstrates Clarity’s versatility: the platform supports the organization’s operating model while giving leaders a consistent view of drug development work.

The Road Ahead: Expand Historical Context and Enterprise-Level Insight

Building on this fit-for-purpose model, the organization plans to extend standardized processes and data governance across more of the product development lifecycle and import legacy project records for historical context.

It is also exploring Clarity hierarchy capabilities to aggregate project status, schedules, milestones, and resource allocations, strengthening enterprise-level oversight as its information needs to mature.

Rego Consulting Capabilities in Action

  • Scalable drug development project oversight
  • Portfolio-wide project visibility and reporting
  • Scalable portfolio governance and decision-making
  • Resource planning with plan-to-actual insight

About Rego Consulting

Rego Consulting helps organizations get more value from Clarity by aligning the platform with the way their teams work. As a global leader in Clarity sales and services, Rego brings deep platform expertise and a phased, practitioner-led approach to implementations and mature-system optimization.

About Rego Consulting

Rego Consulting stands out for our real-world experience and proven, practitioner-led approach to project portfolio management (PPM), cloud migration, and IT financial management consulting. With over 200 expert guides and best practices honed since 2007, we don’t just deliver implementations—we drive business value.

We’re the global leader in Clarity and Rally Software Sales and Services, proudly holding all three of Broadcom’s top partner designations: Clarity Technology Partner, Global System Integrator Partner, and Global Expert Services Partner.