The Financial Management is poorly structured and not improving. Commercial Finance bids studies with limited input from operations and trys to push it out to clients without Project Leader or Oversight Manager review saying they do their own QC and they have SME bidders so they don’t need input from PL/OD who are accountable to the budget to the client. Commercial finance has no idea how units will map into financial forecasting system and Operations Finance has no idea about Commercial Finance and how they build study budgets in their bidding system. There are not great unit standards and the commercial finance team doesn’t keep track of changes they make during revisions leading to errors. Training/ guidance is constantly changing and they don’t seem to handle decisions with any logic or reason and are not receptive to questions or they just don’t have any idea why it’s built the way it is. This makes it impossible to manage the study finances as they are such a mess that custom units pretty much get built for everything and the leadership team is obsessed with overburning of units which are not correctly built from the beginning. It’s no surprise that it’s an utter mess. Do not recommend for anyone who cares about quality as even making suggestions to improve are not received well. Resourcing is also a chore because every resource manager/team wants a custom listing of 20-25 study specific specifications which are already expected to be added in the resource request system, but again there are no standards and the automated calculations are not accurate to the study needs and units so it’s up to the PL and/or FL to come up with their own custom resource management plan as navigating the budget isn’t very useful as the hours are mapped all over the place. This is a huge time expense and there is no budget for project teams to manage resources or complexity of functional areas. There also next to no budget tied to the vendor management. If you try to build these units or add additional meetings to match project expectations, then there’s tons of push back from commercial finance. All of this results in a lot of client confusion and frustration and there’s no effort being made to try and standardize expectations per client, TA or for rare disease or pediatric (vulnerable population) studies that I have been able to observe. If you do get this executed and built into the financial management system, then you run into tons of other errors and omissions that need correction in ConMods where it’s the PLs job to also create custom units in the system, CNFs and make up for all the error left by the commercial finance team.
