This is my question for Week 1. It covers International Project Management. If you have worked on International Projects, what type of project was it and what issues did he or she face? Saving Changes...
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Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
One of the issues I faced with working with colleagues in India, was that when a famous film start died, the streets around our office over there erupted into impromptu public outpourings of grief and riots. The team was advised to go home when a window in a building was smashed. As I recall, we really needed them to do something that afternoon, and an event like that was certainly not on my risk register. Saving Changes...
Wai Mun KooPMO Director| Intergraph PP&MSingapore, Singapore
Project type: CRM and ERP related.
Issues:
Time zone differences-hard to arrange calls tha fit well into everyone's time zone in order not to disrupt their personal time.
Public Holidays-different countries have different public holidays. This is espcially so for country like India where they have different public holidays from city to city. It is important to take note on the public holidays during your planning in order not to have slippage.
Communication-do not expect everyone to be able to speak/read/write a common language (e.g. English) well. People have different langauge capabilities. Check this out and get a translator to stand in if necessary.
Social ethics-know the social ethics and practices for different culture. Something seems to be a norm to you might turn out to be offensive to others. For example, the Japanese hate people to be late in meetings while the Indians shake their heads when they actually say 'Yes' or agree with you.
Change Control-when too many people are involved in a project, it is not easy to get an agreement on any change request. Set up a change control board with the right authorities given to make decision on changes to avoid any unnecessary dispute. Saving Changes...
@ Wai - You are right on the money with your comments. I could not have said it better. Especially, " Social ethics-know the social ethics and practices for different culture." Lots of land mines here.
Saving Changes...
I worked for Nestle GLOBE program. It had three major goals for all 190 countries in the organization:
1. Data cleansing/data standarization
2. Global best practices adoption
3. SAP implementation as standard software tool Saving Changes...
