Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Projects Without Borders
Elizabeth is a freelance writer and project manager living and working in London. She runs The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specializing in project management.
Managing international projects requires much more than calculating that when it’s 9 a.m. in Paris, Texas, it’s 4 p.m. in Paris, France. Cross-cultural teams and customers won’t necessarily work the same way as you. Here are some strategies for discovering the differences and dealing with them.
As the world gets smaller, projects seem to expand to fill the available space, and now many of us are tackling the challenge of managing cross-cultural project teams and cross-cultural project customers. When your project team spans different countries, getting everyone together for a conference call is a new kind of administrative nightmare. But it’s not just the practicalities of working out time zone disparities and correcting the occasional bit of awkward grammar that make cross-border projects so challenging.
National culture plays a big part in how we act and work. Get a group of people together from around the world and they can’t even agree on what noise a rooster makes, so how are they going to come to a conclusion on how to communicate project progress to the stakeholders?
Or, to put it another way, 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.
One financial project manager I know was sent to Spain for a year to set up a…
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"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I... took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost |