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Communications Across the Project

May 22, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Scheduling, HR Management, People Issues, Communications Management

Communications Across the Project (#7 in the series Managing Multicultural Projects with Complementary Practices)
By Johanna Rothman

Communication barriers, including language differences and differences in topics that can/cannot be openly discussed, make it more difficult to develop complementary practices. However, I’ve found that the work of defining milestones and terms helps make those communications barriers more obvious.

Once the communications issues are obvious, you can start fixing them. One of the frequent communications problems is understanding how local cultures play- into what gets said and what is understood by the project teams.

On one project with teams based in Boston and Germany, the Boston-based product development team was dependent on a German subsidiary for an independent, but necessary part of the software product. During project planning, the German project lead had repeatedly told the Boston project lead that the German August vacation schedule effectively meant that no one was working on the project for the first three weeks of August. The original schedule planned the product ship date in mid-July. Sure enough, the schedule slipped. The German technical lead explained that no one from the German team would be able to help with product integration during August. They may as well slip the project from mid-August to mid-September. The German lead was aghast that the Boston lead expected the German team to give up their vacations:

“Why should we give up our vacations because they can’t keep to a schedule? We can’t take vacation four weeks later– our children are all in school then. Postponing vacation is not an option, and I repeatedly told him that. Why didn’t he make his team meet their dates?”

The PM must understand what is important to all the people on the project. One of my colleagues said about multi-geographical projects: “In order for it to work, it takes a lot of work, like a marriage.” In this case, the Boston project leader did not understand the importance of inviolate vacation planning to the German team. I’ve noticed that many European teams keep their vacations inviolate, while most US teams feel free to change their vacation plans.

This communications problem had two components: the first problem was the project manager understanding that each group had different cultural norms around accepted work behavior. The second problem was how each team understood the actual schedule and the actions the entire project team was going to take if the project slipped.

PMs of multicultural projects should expect that each team has different expectations of acceptable work behavior. Here, the Germans were not willing to change vacation plans. Other European cultures never expect to work overtime. In some cultures, it’s unacceptable to question a manager, especially if the manager is a different gender. I once taught a class to Japanese programmers who were uncomfortable asking me questions; they were concerned that I would feel offended. One of my male colleagues has female Asian staff members who won’t ask him questions, especially if those questions look like they are questioning authority. However, his staff will ask other women in the organization. n. As a PM, your job is to open the communications bandwidth by considering other group’s behavior. As you work with different people and groups of people, you may be able to change how they behave, but they’re not going to change just to make it easier for you.

One way to deal with the schedule issues is to publish project plans widely and report on progress frequently. Using inch-pebbles for the last few weeks before critical milestones, such as project shipment is one technique to manage the risk of project slippage. Another technique is to produce an overall project status report weekly. To prevent project status reporting from becoming a huge burden and useless, I generally republish just the planned and actual major milestones and intermediate milestones to the entire project team.

Original article can be found at: http://www.jrothman.com/Papers/Multiculturalprojects.html

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 and is filed under Scheduling, HR Management, People Issues, Communications Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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