Global

   Global projects.  Teams in five different time zones.  Team members traveling.  “We will meet again on the telcon at 5 on Tuesday.”
When?  Tuesday your time?  my time?
Some of us may have a calendar system that automatically can communicate and translate date/time.  Wonderful (and horrible in other ways that we won’t go into here).
Unfortunately, [...]

When I worked at HP/Agilent back in the 1990’s we focused mostly on the US market and a bit on Europe. Now my friends who still work there are making frequent visits to India, China and Poland, markets that were too minuscule to warrant any significant R&D budget, and certainly not personal visits more [...]

Lately I have trouble saying “project management” because, when I do, I always have the urge to blurt out “You can manage cows, but you must LEAD people!” So I’m going to dedicate this week’s blogs to exploring leadership with no apologies to leaving out “management”, and even “project”, every now and then.
Most of [...]

The challenge of managing virtual projects is amplified by a complexity factor equal to the number of cultures represented on your team. When you start doing the computations based on the different cultures related to nationality, company, functional discipline, age and caste you can quickly realize why you and your peers heads are spinning when [...]

A company that has its own software development capability is driven to outsource software development in an attempt to save money or reduce costs. The company’s management may say they’re doing it because they can’t find enough qualified staff locally (or quickly), or so they won’t have to build up an additional development facility, or [...]

Imagine an astronaut lands on Neptune and finds living creatures. What would they be called, aliens? There are no more “foreigners” in our global reality. As a project manager, you’d better have a global mindset because you are likely managing one of the most diverse teams on earth.

Technorati Tags: cruss-cultural, [...]

(Posted on hehalf of Dan Hartford.) Have you majorly screwed up a project? Don’t worry, you may be promoted for it! Several years ago I was working in California for a multinational company with head quarters in Europe that we’ll just call “The Firm”. To give you a sense [...]