I was a little ticked (and it was all I could do to keep it at the “little” level) at the upper management of my company this week.

First, some background. I work at PPD Global Central Labs (PPD GCL), which, along with our sister lab in Brussels, Belgium was formerly MRL International. We were bought by PPD a few years ago, so now we’re one of the many, many different divisions within PPD. I’m a business-minded sort of person, so I try to keep up with the corporate press releases and such. A majority of the news involves corporate PPD and other divisions, but occasionally GCL will be mentioned. If the press release is important enough, all employees of PPD will receive an email about the upcoming news, usually the day before it’s released to the press.

Imagine my surprise when I see the following article on Yahoo Wednesday night:
PPD Expands Global Central Lab Services into China

What really got me was this sentence (emphasis mine):
“PPD to begin immediately providing biopharmaceutical clients with its full range of highly customized central lab services in China.”

Why did this get me? Because I, and most of my co-workers (I checked around), had no knowledge of this. There had been a brief mention at a town hall meeting last summer that management was thinking about and working on setting up a lab in China, which isn’t the easiest thing to accomplish…and that’s the last we heard about it.

Now, all of a sudden, there’s a lab in China that is IMMEDIATELY ready to begin operating, and this is news that directly affects PPD GCL - and my department specifically. All the data managers that deliver data to the clients are based in the US; other employees in the Belgium lab will provide support for China. You would think that sharing updates with employees about this lab as it gets up to speed would be an important thing to do, considering the data isn’t going anywhere if we don’t know about it.

To wrap up the story, I emailed my manager (who was at a conference in Florida with upper management) and told him to ask the senior VP, while he had his ear, why we had to read about this on the internet and why we weren’t informed about this on any level beforehand. I’m assuming something was said, because an hour later, the press release was emailed from corporate to all PPD employees.

This didn’t do anything to ease my mind, especially since this is becoming more and more of a trend lately. There have been several other similar situations, just over the past six months, where key people have completely been left out of the loop, left out of the discussions and implementations of things that directly affect them. I’m sure many of you know what this is like, when non-tech people make tech decisions, when managers of completely separate departments make decisions that affect your department, but don’t include any of your department members in the decisions. It’s pretty clear to me that upper management wants control of everything, and isn’t willing to relinquish this control in the least. It started with micro-managing, now this it’s not letting people know what’s going on…

Maybe I’m making a bigger deal of this than I should. Maybe this is just the way larger corporations work, and as we (PPD GCL) become more and more ingrained in the larger corporate entity that is PPD, we’re starting to be treated increasing as a large corporation, with communication woes and secrets that are common elsewhere. Maybe I need to get used to it…or maybe do something about.