A core strength at ZP is the programme and project management group. The ZP Programme Group is led by PMP certified engineers/scientists. The PM Group at ZP is particularly expert at guiding the contract development and contract manufacturing of electrochemical  biosensors and in-vitro diagnostics (IVD).

Projects involving biosensors are not as deterministic as other types of projects as there is the interplay of biology, biochemistry, chemistry, materials science, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, software engineering etc.

The reality is that biosensor and IVDs projects are non-deterministic and so project management style at ZP has to be adaptable,

At ZP we are an ISO13485 contract developer and manufacturer of electrochemical biosensors and IVDs.

When project managing our customers' projects and programs we are  always applying Project Management Institute (PMI) principles, and so we are trained in the nuances of balancing the conflicting demands of: Good, Cheap and Fast.

The ZP Project Triangle asks the question, which combination of Good, Cheap and Fast is important to you:

• Good and Cheap, therefore the project will not be Fast.
• Good and Fast, therefore the project cannot be Cheap.
• Fast and Cheap, here the output can't be Good; in ZP's opinion this is the worst combination as it is not inline with our ISO13485 based philosophies.

The project management styles we can apply at ZP are: WATERFALL, SCRUM, AGILE and STRATEGIC. As electrochemical biosensors are a mixture of science and engineering we see that AGILE, SCRUM and STRATEGIC work best for the science aspects. For tasks that are more deterministic in nature such as quality documentation, and some electromechanical aspects we can use a WATERFALL approach.

At ZP in an overall programme we will use a mixture of styles we may layout some work as  a WATERFALL, but because of the meeting tools we may operate a SCRUM style within the context of a WATERFALL plan.

WATERFALL

Waterfall is the traditional form of project management where all the tasks are essentially laid out in a linear series, and to move from one task to the next task relies on the completion of the task, analogous to a cascading waterfall. This style of project management heavily relies on Gantt Charts. 

The issue with Waterfall is that as the project makes discoveries, the clients needs change or the market shifts etc then the Waterfall style does not have an inherent flexibility. The fixed structure within waterfall can lock a project into an outcome, but with time the original outcome may no longer be desired.

A classic example in recent times is SARS-CoV-2, where many businesses became locked into a SARS-CoV-2 project plan and as the pandemic and commercial landscape changed these companies could not necessarily pivot.

AGILE

Agile project management style borrows from the software industry where the cycles of build and test can be relatively short.

The Agile Project Management style has not been commonly applied to biosensor and IVD development because biosensor teams are not set up for fast iterations, BUT this is not the case at ZP where the team has very established workflows for rapid development and testing at scale are already in place.