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”.