Adapting to Company Culture: Lessons from Singapore

Haoze Zhang is a project manager in Singapore.

  Career Development   Communications Management   Leadership   Talent Management  

Working for a local company in Asia, it can often be tough for some to manage a project. Because of the different concerns and tradition (from top management as well as the culture difference in society), the managing process I encountered differs from what was described in case studies.

While working for tech companies in Singapore, I gained practical experience dealing with out-of-control projects moving in unexpected directions. I wanted to share some strategies developed in the past few years to help people who are starting a project management career in a company with that culture.

As a project manager, your daily job is to make sure that the talent on the project is working toward the same goal. It’s hard, because many people are coming from different departments with different skills. What makes it worse is that some of the project members hold higher rankings. In this case, my main strategy is not to manage the team, but to consider that I am cooperating with the team to accomplish the project goals.

To elaborate on this main strategy, I’ll present some sub-strategies to make everyone understand it better…

First of all, the project manager should have a “big picture” view to think through the purpose of the project. What are the core elements of the project? In textbook cases, the key elements in the project are scope, cost and…

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