Why the project management for international projects is different?

In order to secure the success of the international projects, the project manager has to consider the project particularities in choosing the project management activities.  But where are the differences?

First of all, the teams are distributed. This alone has consequences for the communication effort, relationship between teams and the way how the work packages are designed and assigned. Since the teams in international projects are distributed in different countries, there are further cultural, language, religious, political differences.   

               In an international project, there are significant cultural differences between different project locations.  Culture is very important, because it has a high impact on the work/task attitude, communication approach, timeline attitude, teamwork, leadership, etc. According with my experience, this is one of the most important factors to be considered in managing an international project.

               Usually an international project is executed in locations situated in different time zones. Therefore the window when the people can communicate directly can be very small. For example you have from West Europe with India only 4-5 hours available, but from US is even worse.        

               The language differences also have a large impact on the project. Your project can use a common language for the project, but in most of the cases it will not be the native language for all the team  members. Accent differences, lack of the language skills of the team members will heavily impact the effectivity of the communication. 

               Most of the international projects are undertaken in very large companies, the project is spanning several organizations and departments. You have to consider that each of these have different interests not always aligned with your project.

               The laws and the regulatory requirements are different in each country, thus you might need to consider that for your project activities (for ex: reporting requirements, working time, the handling of sensitive data).

               In an international project the technical infrastructure at the remote locations can impact your project. For example in some countries the internet connection is still slow and there are often power supply interruptions. Furthermore the kind of technology used at the  project sites can be different and not familiar for all the team members.

               Political particularities at the different project sites should also be considered. For example during the “Arab Spring”, in Egypt, the internet connection was shouted down for a couple of days, thus the communication with the offshore teams in Egypt was almost impossible. 

               In order to succeed in an international project, you must adapt the management process to the differences enumerated above. Some activities to address them are named in my previous blog article:  “Best Practices in Managing Project with Distributed Teams”.

Best Practices in Managing Projects with Distributed Teams

We speak about distributed teams when the project teams are located in different geographical locations. Having distributed teams brings advantages as reduced costs (especially in offshoring) but also a better usage of the talent pools from different locations.

Unfortunately there are additional risks in such projects. Most of them are caused by the communication issues and cultural differences.  Bellow I will list and describe some best practices to avoid or to mitigate those risks.

• Choose a management style which is compatible with the culture of the teams. For example you might need to micro-manage in south-asian cultures, but in western cultures you need to allow the self-management of the teams. 
• Understand cultural differences of the involved teams. This is extremely important when you have offshore development teams.  Everything might depend on it: management style, communication, the way how the teams can be motivated, team stability, etc. 
• Reduce coupling between sites. A remote team shall be able to implement a task with minimal help from other teams. That’s important because the communication needs are much bigger in comparison with the colocated teams. The communication issues are accentuated when the teams are located in different time-zones . Furthermore the effort to coordinate the development effort across sites will be substantially lower when the tasks across sites are proper decoupled. 
• Plan for more coordination effort between sites. 
• Dedicate more effort for the verification and validation of the deliverables. Verify and validate often! Due to the communication issues or cultural differences can happen that a task is not correctly understood or does not meet the quality standards. Therefore plan for a bigger testing team, adopt an iterative development methodology with a short release cycle.   
• Create a shared collaboration platform. Use a distributed revision control and source code management system (ex: GIT, Subversion, etc), distribute information on platforms which are available to all teams ( ex: WIKI, Sharepoint, etc) 
• Use appropriate technologies to improve communication between project sites (messengers as Lync, telephones, live meetings). The communication technologies have to be compatible across sites. 
• Plan for social activities to increase the cohesion of the teams. As an example plan for more travel between project sites, execute very early team building activities. 
• Plan for more formal communication. For example, due to the communication constraints, you need to better specify the requirements or the work packages. 
• Maintain visible an overview of the project organization. Every team member shall know who to contact in order to solve a problem. 
• Improve language skills of the team members.. 
• When planning meetings consider the time differences between sites. For example do not set up meetings at a time when is late evening or night at a remote location.

In further articles I will add more details to some of described best practices. The projects executed with distributed teams are more difficult to manage, therefore a proper understanding of these best practices can improve the project outcomes.