The world of
business is continually shrinking: we work in an environment with real-time
audio visual communication with colleagues on the other side of the world and online
translation tools. Even small companies can operate internationally with
outsourcing agreements and partners overseas, which means that project managers
in organisations of any size face the challenges of managing international
projects.
And that means
far more than just calculating that when it’s 9am in ‘my’ London it’s 4am in
London, Ohio. International projects come with two main challenges: the people
you are working with won’t necessarily work in the same way as you, and the
people you are working for won’t necessarily want the same things.
Having an open
mind about these challenges is the first step in being able to address them on
an international project team. You need a pragmatic approach, especially as
national culture plays a big part in how we act, and we can’t change who we are
– we can just learn how to make those differences work for everyone concerned.
This can be
difficult for project managers to get their heads around. Once you are in the
position of managing an international project, you may well be one of the more
senior project managers in your team. You have gained that position through
hard work and successful project delivery. You expect your project team members
to behave in certain ways and people from different cultures won’t always
behave the way you expect. As you can imagine, that causes problems and
conflict on projects.
Making international working easier
Project
managers taking on international projects face a variety of practical
challenges. For example, time zones are important. How will you conduct
real-time team meetings? Who is going to be the person who gets up in the
middle of the night for a call with the Brazilian development team to go
through the testing results? In the absence of incentives for the project team,
the project manager will find it difficult to recruit volunteers.
Protecting the
interests of the UK-based team also falls to the project manager. A project
sponsor who doesn’t appreciate that you have just spent half the night on a web
conference with the manufacturing supplier in New Zealand won’t look favourably
on your request to send everyone home at 3pm. Project managers with
international components to their teams not only have to educate team members
in how to work well together, but also have to manage upwards and ensure that
senior stakeholders understand the constraints of this type of project. In
reality, international projects take longer and involve higher travel costs
than projects where the entire team is co-located – and that isn’t always a
welcome message to the executives.
Practical
suggestions aside, the easiest way I have found to work with international
teams is to build cultural understanding. As I found when living and working in
France, you can be linguistically literate without being culturally literate.
At a pub quiz I couldn’t answer the questions about children’s TV programmes or
what was found under the streets of Paris (I think, if I remember rightly, that
it was the river). But the pub quiz was in an Irish bar, and there weren’t many
of them around so that was a change of environment for many of my Parisian
colleagues.
Cultural
understanding relies on the emotional intelligence of the project manager, his
or her leadership skills, adaptability and ability to inform and train the
teams.
Using software to help international communication
Aside from
cultural understanding, your next challenge is communication. Successful
communication relies on the soft skills that a project manager brings to the
table. These are the ability to listen, hear the unspoken concerns and
messages, and respond clearly in a way that the other person can understand.
Being able to
put those soft communication skills into practice is something that can be
helped by technology. People need to be able to hear and speak to each other in
some format before the project manger’s emotional intelligence can be put to
good use. Technology can help with the challenges of international projects,
even if we have to accept its limitations with regards to the interpretation of
messages communicated using it.
There are lots
of technologies available to project managers with virtual teams, whether they
are based all over the world or in multiple offices in the same time zone.
Instant messaging gives project teams the ability to connect informally when
their status is shown as online. This can promote collaborative working as team
members can quickly and easily ask questions of their colleagues instead of
waiting for a scheduled formal meeting. In general, the more communication the
greater the bonds and understanding between team members, so provided this
facility is not abused, it can help improve working relationships. In practice,
it works best when all users are in similar time zones where the difference is
only a few hours.
The next step
up from one-to-one messaging is web conferencing, where multiple users join the
same online conference. Applications such as WebEx allow you to hold a virtual
meeting with the team. Web conferencing means you can make changes to documents
in real time or show product demonstrations to the rest of the team without
having everyone in the same room – lower travel costs and a reduction in time
spent out of the office even if you don’t have the international element to
contend with.
Instant messaging
and web conferencing allow synchronous communication, but asynchronous
communication is also useful for project managers with international teams. You
could opt for something as simple as a shared calendar, where team meetings and
project milestones are recorded for everyone to see. When you connect from a PC
configured to a different time zone, Outlook will automatically show the
meeting at the correct time where you are. However, I have been caught out by
the same feature in Google’s calendar, which didn’t seem to adjust for daylight
savings time for some reason – and I missed my conference call.
Whatever
software you choose to use to manage your project, you will quickly realise its
limitations. A good project manager knows when to use the tools, and when to
set the tools aside and lead with understanding and instinct.
Spending some
time with your team members overseas is the best way to understand how they
work, but desk research before you go (or if budget constraints mean you can’t
go) will be beneficial. You will find out a great deal about how team members
will most likely react in the project environment if you see them react, but
that of course relies on you having the time to do that period of ‘getting to
know you’.
Even if you
don’t have lots of time, be curious in the time you do have. Many people love
talking about how their countries work and a short discussion early on in your
project can make a big difference. This knowledge provides you with a framework
to manage the differences that will occur and also the confidence that you can
develop an appropriate way of working together. In a shrinking world, projects
are expanding, and the keys to success in international projects are shrewd use
of the available technologies and excellent cultural awareness.
(Pic Courtesy: Google images)
