I think this is a great point because the biomedical industry is highly cross-functional as you've mentioned. To ensure alignment among stakeholders in a partnership, project managers need to establish clear communication channels, set shared milestones, and create cross-functional teams. Regular meetings, structured updates, and collaborative decision-making can help balance technical, regulatory, and business priorities. Additionally, leveraging project management tools to track progress and fostering a culture of transparency and accountability will ensure all teams are focused on shared objectives.

A major strategy to ensure that all stakeholders stay aligned is by everyone acknowledging who is responsible for certain tasks in a project. Tools can be used in parallel like a Gantt chart and a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix. The Gantt chart will map out the project timeline and help categorize which tasks have slack and which tasks are on the critical path. The RACI matrix then comes into play by keep members in the project responsible for what they are assigned. It will also define who is accountable for the potential outcomes when the task is complete. Then finally, seeing if there needs to be consultations for certain scenarios and who needs to be informed of the outcomes from the task. 

I think the way project managers can balance technical, regulatory, and business goals without causing delays is having a clear understanding with early start, early finish, late start, and or late finish dates. Also, utilizing a risk management team can help create contingency plans when technical, regulatory, and business issues appear. The risk management team can help the project team adapt and pivot quickly to overcome these issues. As a result, the project will be able to get back on track and achieve technical, regulatory, and business goals.

Strategies to align stakeholders are,

1) Identify Your Stakeholders

Before you can align your stakeholders, you first have to know who your stakeholders are. Stakeholder identification requires you to consider all the people, groups, and organizations that may be impacted by your work, have an influence on it, or an interest in it. This includes both internal stakeholders (like employees and shareholders) and external stakeholders (like customers, regulators, and suppliers).

2) Map and Prioritize Stakeholders

 It involves visualizing your stakeholders on charts based on their characteristics or relationships, allowing you to see (at a glance) how you could logically group similar stakeholders. This can be done by relationship mapping and multi dimensional mapping.

3) Stakeholder Needs and Expectations

In order to build alignment, you need to first understand what your stakeholders need and expect from your organization, your project, and one another. Focus groups to deepen your understanding of stakeholder needs and work towards it.

4) Align Stakeholder and Company Goals

You also need to be able to clearly articulate what your stakeholders hope to achieve from:the project, their relationship with your organization, their interactions with other stakeholders, their involvement in the consultation or engagement

5) Develop a Communication Plan

Effective communication is key to building stakeholder alignment, and it all starts with a communication plan to keep your stakeholders informed and engaged from start to finish.

6) Get Stakeholders Involved 

Bring stakeholders into your planning and (where it makes sense) other parts of your project process in order to increase their buy-in and sense of ownership, while helping to improve your project and decisions.

7) Revisit, Realign, and Evaluate 

We also need to continually evaluate your engagement to determine if you’ve been successful in aligning your stakeholders and how you could improve your approach in future. Stakeholders level of engagement. 

Project managers can balance technical, regulatory, and business goals without delay by defining your goals and milestones for each project phase, and align them with your stakeholders' expectations and requirements. This will help you break down your tasks into manageable chunks and set realistic deadlines. Not all tasks are of the same importance or urgency. Prioritize tasks, by using a matrix that categorizes them into four quadrants based on their impact and urgency. High impact and high urgency tasks should be done first, while high impact and low urgency tasks should be scheduled. Also the team and stakeholders discuss the status, progress, and problems of your tasks; updating your project management tool with the latest information; revising your priorities and deadlines based on the current situation; and communicating any changes or issues clearly and promptly. 

Communication throughout the entirety of the project is vital to the success of cross functional collaboration. Team members must be informed of any changes that can impact they are currently working on as it can change how they approach the problem. This can be better managed by having clear updates in the project to signal to the team whose individual contributions rely on the completion of the former. Team members should also be informed of any decisions stakeholders may take and it is the duty of the project manager to ensure all team members are informed of them.

implementing cross-team training programs to promote communication between teams can allow for teams to have a understanding of each groups priorities, and make it less likely that there will be a delay due to miscommunications As for stakeholders, setting up frequent opportunities where the stakeholders to provide feedback throughout the project can allow for early adjustment before issues become to big later on.

One key approach is cross-functional alignment meetings—regular discussions where scientists, engineers, regulatory specialists, and business leaders come together to ensure their priorities aren’t clashing. Having these scheduled touchpoints helps prevent last-minute surprises that could cause delays.

Another useful tool is a decision-making framework, like a structured prioritization matrix. This helps evaluate choices based on technical feasibility, regulatory impact, and business viability. For example, if scientists want a more advanced formulation, but it would slow down regulatory approval, the framework helps weigh the trade-offs objectively.

A strong project manager is also critical—someone who can mediate between different groups and ensure that no single priority dominates at the expense of overall progress. This person should facilitate negotiations, keeping everyone focused on the shared goal: delivering a high-quality, compliant product on time.

Lastly, a joint risk management plan between BoneFix and FactoSet could help anticipate potential bottlenecks, whether in R&D, regulations, or distribution. If both teams are aligned on risks early, they can create mitigation plans before issues arise.

Cross functional work is extremely important, but relies on the members of each party effectively doing their part and communicating. Often times, there is laziness in reaching out to research and development, regulatory, and the stake holders. There can also be assumptions made, that are not true. One of the most dangerous words in the medical device industry is "I thought..". The project plan must place responsibility upon each member of each functional team, and there are times of overlap where approval are needed. Additionally, since they are all project members, then they all need to be made aware of the timing and progression of the project. Cross functionality is important as usually engineers are overwhelmed with their own work and not want another obstacle in their way. However, even though they might be an obstacle, need a way to overcome and promote unity.