What is a Global Project? What are benefits and challenges of International Projects?

Definition of international global projects, benefits and challenges of international global projects

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.

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.  

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."

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.

Benefits and Challenges of International Projects

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: *

• Access to technical experts
• Environmental benefits
• Global workdays
• Improved disaster recovery abilities
• Increased innovation
• Larger pool of potential job candidates
• More accurate picture of international customers' needs
• Proximity to customers
• Reduction in travel time and expenses when starting a local office instead of having team members travel there regularly

Challenges of global projects include: *

• Adapt the organizational culture to virtual teams
• Build trust
• Cope with language differences
• Establish a team identity
• Handle divergent cultural values
• Manage conflict over distance
• Use of communication technology

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

• Culture, art, and sports
• Languages and dialects
• Religious practices
• Legal, regulatory, and reporting requirements (or lack thereof)
• Technology and internet penetration
• Infrastructure and public safety
• Time zones and temporal orientation
• Political systems
• Gender and racial issues, personal liberty
• Corruption and bribery

 

5 Knowledge Areas of the Global Project Management Framework

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. Collaborative tools: 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. Collaborative techniques: 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 e-mails."