Global-teams

How would you translate the innovation culture in the SF Bay Area to a group of international engineering students? Would that include an entrepreneur, a garage, and a creative mind? And the project manager? When invited to organize a road trip to study the SF Bay Area’s role in innovation and technology, I immediately googled [...]

   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, [...]

As the scope of your projects expands, you’ll need to engage teams, not just individuals, from around the world to accomplish your goals. Last weekend I was reminded about the challenging role that leaders who play an interface function between the global leadership team and their organizations. Two consultants from the Organization for Applied Research [...]

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 [...]

The accelerated pace of globalization has made the need for virtual teams essential. The list of benefits that corporate executives tout to stockholders and channel partners is accelerated time to market, customer intimacy, resource utilization, employee retention and cost efficiency, to name a few. The challenge lies at the feet of project managers around the [...]

The programming press and IT journals are full of stories about the failure of software outsourcing. The statistics are sobering. Less than 50% of outsourcing meets financial objectives. The outsourcing of many business processes besides software development also has the same less-than-stellar results.
Forrester reports the top three causes of outsourcing failure are:

Technorati Tags: Global-teams, Metrics, [...]

My last blog talked about applying Five Whys to elements within project management and specifically to human and team dynamics. The more challenging aspect is in attempting to apply the Five Whys on global projects where activities are performed in multiple countries and the team is typically comprised of members from more than one country. [...]

Yesterday I spent 2 hours walking solemnly through the Peace Memorial and Park in Hiroshima, Japan. This was a somber experience for me. At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, in an instant a thriving city was reduced to rubble and throngs of injured people – some screaming for help and others praying for [...]