What Is A Global Project

What is a Global Project? It is common to see organizations that are very successful within a familiar culture stumble when they venture into the international and cross-cultural arena. Star managers at home can easily make costly mistakes abroad and be promptly sent back, frustrated and deflated. Organizations venture into international markets in good faith and with sound intentions, only to encounter roadblocks they had not planned for. It is common for companies to assume that assigning their proven best employees to an international team will take care of the risks. Surely, their best performers can figure out how to get the job done. Unfortunately, this approach and lack of planning leads to, at best, a waste of their best employees' time as they "figure this out" and at worst, leads to project failure, costly mistakes, and low morale. Yet sometimes small businesses with no budget for cross-cultural training can manage the international hurdles quite well. Why? Because their lack of extra cash forces them to be flexible and nimble. Maybe they can't afford to move a star manager abroad with her family for a few years, so they send a junior, adaptable, more open-minded employee who ends up doing quite well. In this course, we will see that while appropriate planning for the additional challenges of an international project does mitigate risks significantly, flexibility and adaptability win the day. These are costless advantages available to the humblest projects and organizations. Success in managing global projects begins with an understanding of what a global project is and what makes a global project different from a local or other virtual project that is managed within a country. Let's first define what a global project is. According to the Project Management Institute, a project can be defined as a "temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service." * You will notice that this definition provides no clarity around the locations where a project may be executed from, leaving this element of project management open to interpretation. For the purposes of discussing global project management, we will define a global project as a "temporary endeavor, delivered by a project team located in more than one country and from more than one organization, undertaken to create a unique product or service." This small addition to our definition of a project adds significant complexity that must be successfully planned for in order for the project to be successful.

Managing global projects presents unique challenges. In this course we will explore the impact on project management of culture, language variations, religious/regulatory/legal practices, technology penetration, temporal orientation, gender issues, corruption, ethics, personal liberty, and political contexts. *REFERENCES Project Management Institute. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). 5th ed. (Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute, Inc., 2013), 553.

Benefits and Challenges of International Projects One of the first questions we will ask ourselves is "Why go global"? What are the benefits of international projects and do they outweigh the risks? Projects are delivered globally for multiple reasons and ensuring success on a global project will require a project manager to know why this particular project is being delivered from more than one country. Typically, organizations explore international avenues as an investment towards higher profitability, or as a direct way to lower costs. A company may decide to produce a part of their product in a country with lower workforce cost. Another may be looking at specific skills to design their product more efficiently and add skilled foreign workers to their home-based team. Another may be eyeing a new market in another part of the world to diversify their offerings and increase profitability. Another internationally established company may decide to team up highly skilled workers from different locations without relocating them. Organizations will likely spend time carefully evaluating the value and risks of having a global project, and perform a cost-benefit analysis with multiple scenarios related to location, communication investments, skills and technology ability of the local workforce, production costs, etc. Advantages of global projects include: *

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Access to technical experts

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Environmental benefits

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Global workdays

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Improved disaster recovery abilities

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Increased innovation

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Larger pool of potential job candidates

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More accurate picture of international customers' needs

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Proximity to customers

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Reduction in travel time and expenses when starting a local office instead of having team members travel there regularly Challenges of global projects include: *

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Adapt the organizational culture to virtual teams

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Build trust

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Cope with language differences

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Establish a team identity

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Handle divergent cultural values

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Manage conflict over distance

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Provide communication technology In addition, each of these advantages and challenges can be affected by the following global factors:

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Culture, art, and sports

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Languages and dialects

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Religious practices

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Legal, regulatory, and reporting requirements (or lack thereof)

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Technology and internet penetration

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Infrastructure and public safety

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Time zones and temporal orientation

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Political systems

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Gender and racial issues, personal liberty

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Corruption and bribery

*REFERENCES Binder, Jean. Global Project Management: Communication, Collaboration and Management Across Borders. (Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 2007), 11-12.

Beyond Project Management: International Trade VERIFIED STUDENT BONUS MATERIAL This section contains a bonus (optional) resource on the complexities of international trade that goes beyond what we will learn about the complexities of global projects. This bonus content is available to verified students only and is for their individual use.

Historically, international trade has played a critical role in enabling countries to grow, develop, and become economically powerful. Through international trade in goods and services, the economies of different countries are more closely linked to one another now than ever before. At the same time, the world economy is more turbulent now than it has been in decades. Keeping up with the shifting international environment has become a central concern in business strategy and national economic policy. Countries engage in international trade for two basic reasons, each of which contributes to the country's gain from trade. First, countries trade because they are different from one another. Nations, like individuals, can benefit from their differences by reaching agreements in which each party contributes its strengths and focuses on producing goods in which each is especially efficient. Second, countries trade to achieve economies of scale in production. That is, if each country produces only a limited range of goods, it can produce each of these goods at a larger scale

and hence more efficiently than if it tried to produce everything. In the real world, patterns of international trade reflect the interaction of both of these motives. If you are interested in learning more about international trade, we encourage you to explore this free online course from Saylor Academy: ECON307: International Trade UMMARY OF THE 5 KNOWLEDGE AREAS The following summary comes from from Jean Binder's website: * "There are many literary sources that make recommendations on virtual teams, virtual projects and international management. They cover a significant amount of knowledge on virtual projects but do not address all the challenges and recommendations for global projects. Organizations may need to adapt their cultures, procedures and technological environment when moving from co-located to virtual and global project management. Some authors argue that project managers and team members also need to change the way they communicate and interact with each other. Organizational change principles might be used to obtain participation in the change process and increase the acceptance of the new working dynamics from all stakeholders. This suggests the usage of basic organizational change variables to analyze the literature and form a basic model for best practice: people, tasks, structure and technology.

The Global Project Management Framework© suggests good practices required for global projects, grouped into discrete knowledge areas:

1. Global teams: the knowledge on people management can cover the stakeholder management challenges and recommendations for global projects. 2. Global communication: the project management tasks that suffer more from the dispersion of stakeholders are those associated with communication (meetings and one-to-one discussions). 3. Global organizations: the knowledge area that will contain all recommendations on organizational structure for successful global projects. 4. The vast amount of knowledge in the technology area, available in the literature, can be grouped into two different categories. At first there are many recommendations for the evaluation and deployment of

hardware and software to facilitate communication over distance, covering the central implementation of the collaborative tools within the company and their installation and setup by project managers and team members. One example is the 'identification of basic criteria for evaluating products and services for virtual teams or globally dispersed projects'. 5. The second category of technical knowledge describes the usage of effective collaborative techniques in order to achieve efficiency, with practical recommendations to be followed when employing the tools. For example, the establishment of common rules and tips for emails." We will explore aspects of global teams in Week 1, Week 2, Week 4, and Week 5. Global communication is the main subject of Week 3. We will cover global organizations, collaborative tools, and collaborative techniques all in Week 7.

Stereotyping Before we explore cultural dimensions, a word about stereotyping. A stereotype is a standardized mental picture that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment. To stereotype is to believe unfairly that all people or things with a particular characteristic are the same. It is an exaggerated or limited view of a group behavior, typically under the lens of an observer who takes only a few examples as a reference. In brief, it is inappropriate and wrong in the sense that it is associated with lack of judgement that comes across as disrespect. Don't do it, in this class or in the workplace. Combined experiences make people unique and nuanced: ethnic origin, region where you live, language, gender, education, industry where you work, etc. The cultural dimensions that we are about to explore are not an attempt to box specific cultures into a stereotype. They are the result of rigorous research and are not just casual observations or generalizations. They also do not prescribe a specific response, are not guidelines for tourists, and are not personality assessments. The cultural dimensions as presented by Hofstede, Trompenaars, Meyer, and others are an efficient tool for business people to build their cultural intelligence. They serve as indicators only and should never be taken as universal truths. People are influenced

by their culture but also by local sub-cultures and regional traits, which would render universal truths and profiles inaccurate if they weren't already inappropriate. When exposed to other cultures (through business, migration, or hosting people from other cultures), most people evolve an adapted style that makes it easier for them to respond to new challenges. Other people harden their own cultural rigidity. Some do both. You will encounter all types, behaviors, and reactions in your project management exchanges and it may be hard to thoroughly and accurately determine every aspect. As you build your cultural intelligence and experiences, you will develop a more intuitive approach to handling these situations without having to resort to a formal and detailed analysis. Cultural intelligence is your ability to interpret someone's unfamiliar gestures the way that person's culture would, in a natural fashion (without resorting to analytical tools, or, if you will, while "thinking on your feet"). Next week we will talk more about cultural intelligence and explore ways to acquire it and practice it.