Also a great comment at the bottom as well, concerning oversight and qualification of staff/management:
A good article and some candid points well made. It would be good to see a follow up article from a CROs perspective. I work for a company that independently verifies the competence of staff (in both pharma and CRO). We're currently working on a quality initiative that allows a sponsor a transparent overview of quality of staff benchmarked against industry : one of the big 7 CROs are doing this to demonstrate quality to their sponsors. I would say when we assess the competence of Project Managers, especially with respect to timelines, budget and resources, you see a very big difference in understanding between pharma and CRO.