Biotech Collaboration Milestones and FTE Tracker

Biotech Collaboration Milestones and FTE Tracker is a PlanMagnet concept for biotechnology and genomics companies running research partnerships that pay on milestones and fund full-time equivalents (FTEs). It puts each milestone's acceptance criteria, due date, payment and evidence on one page, beside the FTEs the contract funds and the effort people gave, so alliance managers and project scientists prepare for the steering committee from the same records.

In a biotech collaboration, the agreement defines what counts as done and how many scientists the partner is paying for, but the evidence lives in lab records and the effort lives in timesheets. A sequencing run held for a few weeks is often not connected to the milestone payment it threatens until someone assembles the committee pack, and an FTE shortfall caused by people moving to other work often surfaces only when the quarterly FTE report is due.

The illustrated page sits under Milestones in the Projects area and shows a sample three-year target discovery collaboration with a pharma partner. Badges give the collaboration year and the steering committee date, and tiles count milestones accepted, milestones at risk, milestone payments recorded against the total and the average FTE gap for the quarter. The Milestones table lists each milestone with its acceptance criteria, due date, payment, evidence and status: two accepted, one at risk and one not started. The highlighted at-risk milestone, a validated package of three targets, names a held run lane for one of its targets, and an evidence panel beneath it lists cohort variant evidence consent-checked in SemanticFed, a completed CRISPR knockout for one target and validation sequencing for another target with a re-pool date. An FTE commitment panel charts committed against actual FTEs for three months, with actual effort below the commitment every month and well below it in the last two, and notes effort from two scientists going to an innovation grant.

The concept builds on PlanMagnet's milestones and is designed to work with three other Burdenoff products. Each deliverable is designed to link to the LabsOfScience experiments and data versions that form its evidence, including cohort evidence consent-checked in SemanticFed, so a slipped run shows up on the milestone it threatens. Using capacity from CrewFoundry, planned FTEs are designed to be checked against each scientist's availability, and approved CrewFoundry timesheets attributed to the collaboration project are designed to hand off as actual effort by month, so a gap is flagged before the quarterly FTE report. A Compile committee summary action is designed to draft the steering committee summary from the milestones, evidence and effort. The partner, milestones, amounts and names shown are sample data.