On a hot summer afternoon in Shanghai, our conversation with Xianjing Yu took an unexpected turn toward the basketball court.

“I played basketball for seven years,” she told us. “I was a point guard.”

It is a role that says something about the person who chooses it. A point guard has to see more than what is directly in front of them. They watch where teammates are moving, anticipate what might happen next, and decide when to pass, when to change direction, and when to keep the play moving.

She recalled it in the same organized way she spoke about everything else. For a moment, it was easy to picture a younger Xianjing moving across the court, watching the players around her and deciding where the ball needed to go next.

Those basketball games belong to a much earlier chapter. Xianjing later left Shanghai to study environmental chemistry in France. After returning home, she began working at the bench on new drug discovery. It was an unplanned entry into the pharmaceutical industry.

Project management was not a destination she had mapped out from the beginning either. But looking beyond her own position was already familiar to her. As a researcher, she focused on the science in front of her while also paying attention to how drug programs were shaped by decisions across teams, the progress of a company’s pipeline, and changes in the wider market. Over time, her attention extended from one part of drug development to how the program moved as a whole.

Today, as Senior Director of Project Management at BioDuro, Xianjing works on a very different kind of court, one made up of labs where scientific work, operational demands, project timelines, and client priorities are constantly in motion. The setting has changed, but the responsibility feels familiar. In both roles, the most visible individual result tells only part of the story. “On the basketball court, at least you can see the score,” Xianjing said. “Project management has no simple scoreboard.”

A Full Day, No Simple Score

For people new to project management, the work that fills a day can be easy to account for but difficult to value: meetings attended, timelines updated, questions followed up on, and information passed between teams.

“In the lab, you can point to the research data. In a manufacturing plant, you can point to a completed batch,” Xianjing reflected. “With project management, it is harder to point to one result and say, ‘This is the value I created.’”

Xianjing has seen people new to the role struggle with that gap. Rather than simply reassure them that the work matters, she helps them see that their contribution cannot be fully captured by a single metric or deliverable. She asks instead: What changed because the PM was there?

Did a potential risk surface earlier? Did teams understand how one decision would affect another? Did a disagreement become a decision? Did a project continue moving when the original plan no longer worked? Those are harder things to put on a scoreboard. But they can determine whether a complex program keeps moving forward.

When the Plan Changes

That becomes especially clear when a project does not go according to plan.

Consider a familiar CMC scenario: as a small-molecule drug substance program approaches scale-up, process development reveals a previously unobserved solid form. Depending on its properties, the new form could affect solubility, dissolution or stability. Formulation work and analytical method development are already underway, while the project timeline has been built around a reserved manufacturing slot and planned IND filing.

The finding may call for additional studies or changes to the drug substance control strategy, formulation plan or analytical methods. Any resulting shift in the GMP campaign or supporting data package could affect the filing timeline, while the unplanned work may compete with other programs for shared capacity.

For Xianjing, this is where project management becomes less about maintaining a plan and more about helping the program respond to reality. The scientific conclusions remain with the technical experts. Her role is to trace how those conclusions affect timelines, resources, dependencies, and connected workstreams. She brings those connections into view so the right people can make decisions with the whole program in mind.

The goal is to make every change does not disappear.

Putting the Change on the Table

“In drug development, some contributions are easier to see than others,” Xianjing said. “The value of a PM’s work often becomes clearest in the decisions a program can make and act on.”

A change in one part of a program can affect several teams, altering their timelines, technical requirements, or resource needs. Each team may have sound reasons for its position, but the program still needs one path forward.

Putting the change on the table may sound simple. For Xianjing, it begins with understanding not only how the change affects each team, but also what lies behind its position. One team may need to preserve the original schedule because of a downstream milestone; another may see a technical risk not visible elsewhere. Knowing what needs to be raised, and when and how to raise it, helps her bring the teams together to consider the program’s options and how each would affect the rest of the work.

“PMs often find themselves bringing an update no one was expecting,” Xianjing joked. The real work is helping the team understand what the change means for the broader program and keeping everyone moving toward a better decision.

In that sense, the PM is not the person taking the shot. The PM helps make sure the right people are in position to take it.

Seeing the Whole Court

That perspective shapes how Xianjing thinks about her role. A complex drug development program is made up of people with different expertise, responsibilities, priorities, and ways of looking at the same problem. No single person sees everything.

The PM has a different vantage point. By connecting what is happening across functions, the PM can help the team see not just what is happening in one part of the program, but how the pieces affect one another.

That broader view can give clients earlier visibility into potential risks, a clearer understanding of the choices ahead, and fewer late surprises as the program moves forward.

At BioDuro, this is where the PMO’s contribution takes shape. Beyond coordinating what is already known, the team brings forward what might otherwise remain between functions, helping experts work from a shared view of the program.

Integration, after all, is not demonstrated by a diagram of capabilities. It is experienced in how a program moves.

No Simple Scoreboard

On the court, Xianjing learned to see the whole game, anticipate what was coming, and help her teammates find the next play. Today, she brings much the same perspective to drug development — connecting people, anticipating changes, and helping the program keep moving.

There may be no scoreboard in project management. But when the right people are connected, the next decision is clear, and the whole team keeps moving forward, the impact is there to see.

Perhaps Xianjing never really left the court. She simply found a different one.