In my opinion, there's benefits to both having a project management department within the company and hiring from outside of the company. By creating a project management department within the company, the team will specialize solely in the products that the company offers. The members of the team will exhibit high expertise in the devices within the company which would be beneficial to the management of future projects. With a portfolio containing details and assessments of previous projects, a baseline is created to ensure the project management team is properly implementing previous practices. 

On the other side, if a company hires a project management team through an outside contract, the team will be familiar with a plethora of different companies and projects which gives them an upper hand with a comprehensive outlook on the various company-specific project guidelines. Although this is a great benefit in many ways, this may also be considered a disadvantage.

From my limited experience working within a medical device company, I've noticed that my company doesn't have a defined project management department but rather select engineers that are within different sections of the organization that are designated project managers. These project managers then work with their project team/department to accomplish the project tasks. As for contracting companies, I know of one that does exist as one of my classmates work there, ProjectFarma ( Home • Project Farma ). I think it really depends on the project that is being run, some of which may be outsourced to companies like ProjectFarma for their project management engineers to run.

Its also interesting to think about Dr.Simon's Lecture on the different organizational types (Matrix, Project-based, and Functional) and how project management functions within them.

Thanks,

Matt

I have also worked in a company that did not have a separate project management organization contracted and therefore integrated it within their own company. Thought I have not experience a contracted PM, I think having your own is beneficial as the individuals are more acquainted with your company and can better perform as a PM as opposed to just following a set guideline. They can better understand the intricacies of the situation as well. However I do see one benefit of a contracted PM organization is that since they specialize in this area they have seen what works and doesn't work in the field and can use that expertise to make planning more efficient (though it will come with an added cost as opposed to doing it yourself).

From my experience with medical devices, we used designated an individual within our departmental organization as the Project Manager. I believe this is a better idea than using someone outside the company since they may not have as much knowledge of the company and the resources that he/she can use within the company. By having someone "on the inside" as the Project Manager, they will be better able to communicate with the team that is under them. From my personal experience, the Project Manager for my group (Medication and Drug Delivery) had been working at the company for 20+ years. This gave them knowledge of the other engineers and researchers at the company and lot of experience working with the groups that continually assist the department. 

@jbarbee I agree, I think there is value in having an internal PM and also having fresh eyes from a third party service come in to evaluate and assist in the implementation as well. 

There is no set way for a company to decide on its project management. There are advantages to both methods. When having members of the same company be part of the project management team, the team will contain members that are highly skilled and experts in the project since they work for the company itself and with the product itself. On the other hand, hiring a team from the outside offers a new perspective on the project that can give the company some fresh insight. However, the disadvantage for this method is that they might try to implement a method that has worked on another company's project but won't work on this project. I think that a company that specializes in project management attracts its customers by showing them their rate of their success with previous projects in terms of costs, profits, and schedule.

I don't have any experience working with medical devices, at least not yet. But from what I've gathered here at Morehouse School of Medicine, a project manager can be very vital to a medical device start up.