Tag: Communication

During the last decades, large projects tend to involve people from all around the world, extending the breadth of skills that a Project Manager should possess. Multi country project teams and virtual project team composition seems to be the norm in today’s globalized economy. Making the transition from managing projects where the complete team is local, to managing projects with teams covering various time zones and nationalities becomes increasingly challenging. It should thus be one of the areas that Project Managers managing such projects allocate additional planning time, to avoid any pitfalls that might create tensions and lead to overall problems. In the end it all comes down to managing culture.

Managing Culture is as important as managing any Technical side

One of the most important factors in today’s multinational teams seems to be cultural management. As highlighted among others by Sheriff (2001), Kloppenborg and Petrick (1999) and Ely and Thomas (2001) culturally diverse teams have an inherent extensive dynamic that calls for the appropriate cultural management. Managing culture is not simply a question for adding one more item to the project risk register, but rather the conscious effort by the Project Manager to encompass a whole philosophy of promoting equality and positive team spirit, no matter the origins and the mix of the team.

Managing culture is not an easy treat. There are a lot of different factors to be taken under consideration and a lot of decisions can be directly affected by them. A successful Project Manager should try to identify any such issues from the very beginning of the project and be prepared, so that no such issues could cause delays or any other problems. The following steps could be followed:

1.      Outline the diversity from the beginning of the project

As with most issues, the key element in solving any problem is actually identifying the problem. A successful Project Manager should identify cultural diversity and outline it from the very beginning of the project. By having in mind that team members are human beings who may not share common background, both work-wise and society-wise is the first step in eliminating possible threats to the team performance.

2.      Study the culture of the people and organization with which you are planning to work and take this into account during your project preparations.

In today’s world, cultural information is widely available through sources as the internet and there are many specialized consultants that can provide helpful insight into such matters. In the case where a company has ventured into multi-country projects in the past, cultural information should be readily available.

3.      Plan Communications

With the advance of internet technology one would assume that communications should be made easy with these diverse teams. This might not always be the case when working with a multinational project team. Working across different time zones, with different hierarchical structures and quite possibly multiple reporting lines for the various team members, having a proper communication plan in place is of the utmost importance. Furthermore the actual means of delivering the communication should not always be considered as something trivial. While email, telephone and online meeting are widely available across the world, it may be the case that in some countries (and quite possibly in some organizations) such facilities are restricted. Ideally the best way to avoid any such issues would be to take the following steps:

• Investigate the means of communication delivery that would be available to all team members, regardless of their status within the team and place of work
• Plan to have a number of sessions with all team members concurrently. A short 10 minute teleconference or web conference where all team members are available can strengthen team dynamics and provide for much better and cohesive team morale.
• Be careful of the way information is communicated throughout the team. It may be the case that only the higher echelons of the team receive some of the information, according to the project communication plan. However, it is in the Project Manager’s best interest to try to confirm delivery of all information to the project team.

4.      Promote relationship building, transparency and trust amongst the members

One of the most important parts in aiming for success when working within any team is to promote a culture of transparency and trust among the individual team members. All the individual members should be made to feel a part of the team, irrespective of the amount of time that they will personally contribute to the project and/or their organizational position. Needless to say that a culture of trust is not something that is imposed on team members by management, instead it is something that should be instilled within the very fabric of each corporation.

5.      Introduce a culture of interactivity and transmission of knowledge and skills

One of the most beneficial tools that the Project Manager has in his arsenal is interactivity. By enforcing the need for transmission of knowledge and skills, the Project Manager is promoting a subconscious bonding environment within the team. It may be that even a simple mention of something new (a new technology used by a team member, a new piece of hardware) can ignite a discussion that can only make the team bonds stronger. However it must be mentioned that the transmission of knowledge and skills does not just involve a vertical implementation that is limited to just within the project team. It should be extended horizontally in order to encompass the whole of the corporation. For example if this is the first time that your company is moving into this territory then it would be beneficial if such information could be made available to the next person who might take over such tasks of leading international and diverse teams. This is yet another case where the role of the PMO becomes very useful.

6.      Judge and be ready to adapt as the team or the environment changes

A Project Manager should always be prepared for change. It is very rare that the encompassing environment in any project remains constant. More often the overall situation changes and so is the case when multinational teams are involved, both in the sense of a change of team resources, but also due to other reasons, such as political and environmental. The Project Manager should be able to take into account any such issues and have contingency plans ready. One should never forget that the team members are humans and their performance can be affected by areas beyond the restrictive confines of the actual project. In such cases where issues beyond the control of the Project Manager affect individual team members, while project performance is key, the personal side of things should be examined.

In conclusion, what must be stressed is that the need to plan for cultural management and communications is becoming more and more important in today’s globalized marketplace. As projects increase in complexity over time, project teams become more extended, both in terms of national diversity as well as ethnic diversity. It is up to the successful project manager to integrate all team members, irrespective of their origins into one cohesive unit that will ultimately contribute to the overall project success.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

References

• Sherif, M. H., Diversity, “Culture and Technical Project Management”, IAMOT Paper Archive, 13 January 2001
• Kloppenborg T. J. and Petrick J. A., “Leadership in project life cycle and team character development”, Project Management Journal, 30 (2): 8-13, June 1999.
  • Ely R. J. and Thomas D. A., Cultural Diversity at Work: The Effects of Diversity Perspectives on Work Group Processes and Outcomes, Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 229-273
    Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University

Ilias Korkondilas (MSc, PMP, MIET) is a seasoned professional with a long experience in IT, Telecommunications and Project Management. Ilias has successfully led large international teams focusing on providing results while ensuring consistency with company strategy, commitments and goals. Currently he is working as a Project Manager for Olympic Air, Greece’s premier airline.

Abstract

Story telling is a start of a social and cultural journey that inevitably leads to a knowledge management artefact.  Whether our communications means are oral, graphic, video and/or written, innovative ideas and concepts are exchanged among people.  In a real sense, the storytelling and social interaction of people is the precursor to knowledge management.  Knowledge management as a codified structure data is as volatile as the organization itself.    Without the links back to the original storytelling from communities of practice or social networking applications to assist project teams, there is the increase of unknown risks that will impact project success.

Discussion

Storytelling is prevalent in every organization.  It forms the informal social glue that keeps organizations together.  Story telling recants organizational successes, failures, what might have been, what never happened.  When someone comes up with what appears to be a new or innovative idea, the first layer of conversation typically involves looking at the inspiration from various perspectives, interpretations and analysis to determine if the idea is worth pursuing or seeking further encouragement.  This new story begins to infiltrate the social fabric of the organization.

[1] Andrew Cox writes “Thus these stories could be regarded as social in least three senses: because they were improvised socially, because part of their benefit was to produce a sense of belonging, and because some of the material of the stories is about people, customers.”

Social networking tools are an invaluable repository to capture this involving story.  The collaborative nature of social networking offers a plethora of communications levers from wikis, to documentation management, blogging, chat and others as means to explore the conversation.  The social inclusion of participants can be expanded or contracted as desired the idea morphs, ambiguity expands and rationality converges to validate or repeal the evolving artefact.  At its core, this is what storytelling is all about.

As this new reflective knowledge begins to take shape (e.g. research proposal, white papers, unofficial prototypes) and becomes solidified, the storytelling begins to give way to definable, tangible, explainable discussions and reviews.  In this way, the organization’s capacity begins to translate much of its tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.  Design features are refined, business decision support systems attempt to validate the commercial success, and operational support and strategic fit are investigated.  The original storytelling, it would seem, has fulfilled its purpose and now has been converted into a knowledge management process.  Is that really the case?

A counterforce to new storytelling and knowledge exploration is, ironically, the organization itself.  All organizations have a cultural definition that ebbs and flows over time.  The cultural definition can be viewed as the dominant storytelling trait of ‘this is how we do things around here’.  As business models are exploited, standard operating procedures are defined, organizational learning and growth ascend and the customer begins to rewards us with repeated business.  This is all well and good and imperative to ensuring the basic financial business model components are aligned. 

The difficulty stems from the fact that the organization has its own storytelling or messaging to get across to its community.  Sometimes new and old storytelling clash and if the old storytelling continues to prevail, the organization begins to stagnate.  The incumbent storytelling has its own cultural inertia and it may not be a simple matter to overcome.  This often results in good ideas going unnoticed such as Xerox with it PARC’s innovation and Nucor as a mini-mill giant to name a couple of well researched organizations. 

As importantly, being cognizant as to what is happening to knowledge management within the firm.  Organizations, like knowledge, are volatile identities with plenty of complexities.  Just because information is codified into a structured format doesn’t mean we can disconnect the social ingredients from the knowledge itself; however, this is often the starting point where knowledge management begins to completely take over.  To oversimplify, we have a problem, a cause and then a solution.  That solution, often time as it evolves into a business case, becomes a new project.

Project management often looks upon ambiguity as something that needs to be boxed in, “solutioned” and change-managed.  Without these qualifiers, projects will often undergo immediate stress fractures and project ‘failures’ are more likely than not.  This is a reasonable position to assume; however, this approach is allied with the working assumption that knowledge management is reasonably concrete and devoid of any social processes or input.  It is the absence of the social context from the original storytelling that is the source of the functional gap.

If there isn’t a community of practice and/or a social networking application that can complement the project team’s knowledge arsenal, the project team will probably suffer the slings and arrows of unknown project risks. 

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Andrew Cox. Reproducing knowledge: Xerox and the story of knowledge management. (2006 July 20).  Retrieved April 19, 2011, from http://www.palgrave-journals.com/kmrp/journal/v5/n1/full/8500118a.html.

Robert Castel is the founder of Information Resource Technologies and is responsible for Business Development with Vinezoom. He has extensive experience implementing high risk, complex IT related projects in Canada, the US and United Kingdom.

As an independent project manager, Robert’s clients have been the major Canadian banks for national and international initiatives employing IT Service Management frameworks within voice and data infrastructures, application conversions, directory services and change management projects. In addition, he has worked with a Federal healthcare agency involving security and privacy of information related initiatives, and the Province of Ontario.

Robert is currently in the third year of Athabasca University’s Executive MBA Program.

In my last blog entry, I discussed the process of constraint management at the heart of Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC). I presented briefly the steps to follow to manage the «capacity and will to change», which I believe to be the main constraint in projects involving an organisational, cultural or transformational change of some sort. I wrote that we had to see the positive side of this constraint instead of seeing only its consequence if not managed (increased “resistance to change”). In Goldratt’s view, a capacity or flow constraint is often something beneficial that needs, not to be eliminated (which is most of the time impossible), but rather, to be elevated to increase its throughput. What he says is that such a bottleneck is useful because it permits you to control flow or throughput. After all, this is the reason (and a very good idea) why bottles have bottlenecks!

The positive aspect of the capacity and will to change bottleneck is that, if you get and permit people to express themselves on how they feel about the change they are going to contribute to and/or be affected by, the multiple perspectives thus presented will permit you to:

• see risks that you might have not anticipated by yourself,
• see other alternatives and even seize some opportunities that are presented to you to accelerate and/or increase the benefits anticipated both for the organisation and for the project stakeholders, … and/or
• discover and create new benefits from this project, at the end of it or as it evolves.

While introducing these new propositions that enhance the value of your project, you will develop, with everybody involved, a clearer vision of the objective, the why of this project [i] ; this common, shared vision is a necessary prerequisite [ii] to be able to elevate the capacity and will to change constraint.

Once the why of the project is well understood, we can look at what has to be done to elevate the constraint and… at how to do it, in the best way possible, to achieve and accelerate project success. When looking at the two elements of the constraint, capacity and will, we can look at these as two types of maturity, the same as the ones discussed in the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership model:

• the capacity available, which can be associated to a technical maturity level (I can or I cannot ). I associate this with the part of Vroom’s Expectancy Theory of Motivation I discussed previously and that I called the Capability Principle [iii]
• the amount of «will» displayed, which can be associated to a «psychological maturity» level («I want or I want not»). Still referring to Vroom’s theory, I call this the «Desirability Principle».

The Elements of Technical Maturity

I believe that technical maturity depends on at least these three different types of knowledge:

• the know what:
  • information on the object and purpose of the project,
  • information on its evolution, as well as
  • information on individual and group/team perceptions and expectations as they also evolve from the beginning to the end of the project.
• the know what to do:
  • information on the specific actions or deliverables to execute, individually and as a team to achieve success
• the know how to do:
  • a project structure organised around clear roles and responsibilities,
  • the use of specific strategies, processes or sequences of actions to achieve success individually and as a team, as well as
  • the availability of the skills (competency) required individually or as a group to achieve the results anticipated.

However technical maturity is not only a question of knowledge, but also depends on the availability of proper physical resources when required, including among others:

• availability of economic (budgets, money and proper cash flows) resources in the quantity and at the time required;
• availability of material resources (materiel, space, equipment, informational/TI resources, tools, etc.) of the proper nature, and in the quantity and at the time required;
• availability of the qualified performing/affected humans:
  • in the quantity and at the time required, as well as
  • at the necessary level of readiness when required (a very important parameter of the «capacity maturity» equation, the «elevation» of which will be discussed in a later blog entry)…..
• ….and, finally availability of enough time to realise what is necessary in the timeframe that is desired and/or has been set for the anticipated change to be implemented and for its benefits to materialise. 

The Elements of Psychological Maturity

It seems obvious that the wilI to change cannot be treated independently of the capacity to change. The change contemplated cannot be achieved if one has the will but does not have the capacity required to succeed that change. Will without proper means is just wishful thinking and really not sufficient to succeed. Those means must be found and made available. In fact, many studies on the phenomenon of resistance to change have concluded that the main reason people resist change is not a question of desire, but a question of perceived capacity: they just do not believe they CAN make that change or CAN survive, uninjured, this change. More often than not, resistance to change comes from insecurity with respect to one’s ability (a capacity issue) to evolve towards or to succeed in the newly changed environment.

The reverse proposition is also true. Even if you have the «capacity» to change, if you do not have the desire to change, things will just not happen by themselves. So, besides the «capacity issue», what other elements have to be taken into account to elevate «psychological maturity»?

I believe that psychological maturity depends on at least:

• two parameters, those identified by Vroom’s in his Expectancy Theory of Motivation and that influence desirability, namely:
  • the nature of the element(s) of the change project answering to both the current and evolving needs/expectations of the performing/affected stakeholders, the WIIFM (what’s in it for me), and
  • the perceived value of this WIIFM, when compared to the effort required to obtain it (is it worth it ?…also called by Vroom the “valence” of the need/expectation that will be met)
• …. as well as on the existence of proper collaborative behaviours, those that will change a group into a team of highly motivated and performing interdependent individuals.

I think the table is set now to discuss in more details, in my next blog entries,  the methods and approaches that can be used to elevate both the technical and the psychological maturity levels of a change project stakeholders and, in so doing, the capacity and will to change constraint. More coming on this subject !