Examples


Sambac Energy

Sambac attempted to do project leader rotation for many years. That is, in one year a manager from Alpha would arrive to run the office and projects. The following year someone from Beta would come to manage. As was discussed in the first chapter, the two companies operate with very different cultures. In one there is encouragement to be entrepreneurial. In the other, the organization is hierarchical. Thus, one manager would tend to make decisions and take action. In the following year, the entire pattern would change and decisions would go back to headquarters for analysis.

This created many problems with projects as well as with the local employees. Many projects extended beyond one year. The original estimates of time and budget would have to be thrown out of the window due to the change of management and a different management style. Projects were not the only things in turmoil. The local managers and staff would often receive contradictory instructions from the new manager.

There was also no overlap of managers. In some cases, the manager who had been there would leave before the new manager arrived. In other cases, the overlap was minimal. With all of this it is in a way a miracle that anything got done. The salvation was that much of the work was daily production work that went on in the same manner. That kept the money rolling in.

As time went by, the nature and seriousness of the problems began to be understood by both firms. However, there was no real incentive to address the issue. Finally, since the two companies could not deal with it at headquarters, they assigned someone to go out and address the issue locally.

The first recommendation was to implement local management as senior leaders under the expatriate manager. This gave more stability to the organization and more local accountability for the projects. The effects and benefits were almost immediate. With more stable project environments, projects began to be completed at a higher rate. Both schedules and budgets were met more often.

With this success, the next step was to define the role of the expatriate manager in more detail. There were many larger potential projects that spanned several years that were promising, but had not been given attention due to the management situation. It was recommended that the expatriate managers focus on these longer-term projects. Again, this was successful.

A final recommendation was to address the problem of lack of overlap. The recommendation here was to have a 3-month overlap so that the new manager could get up to speed on the work. Another benefit was to have shared management over the large projects. Today, this has been extended further. There are now two managers at all times. They overlap each other by 6 months (a staggered 6 months).

Whitmore Bank

The initial idea of project management was to appoint one manager from the most technologically advanced country in the region. This was done and seemed to work. After all, this approach reflected the style and approach of management of Whitmore Bank to ensure that there was accountability. However, it soon became clear that there were problems. First, the manager was insensitive culturally to people from the other countries. It turned out that he had traveled very little to these other countries. He also had a domineering personality. Second, the plan and direction came entirely from his office. People at the local level were given no opportunity to give input into the plan. They felt cut out of the loop.

The problems grew worse because the manager was not tracking the work closely. People would generally tell him what he wanted to hear. Needless to say, issues started to grow. The good team members were taken off of the project in different countries since local management saw the effort as a failure. They figured that once headquarters saw the failure, they would replace him and work could really get going. This turned out to be true. Unfortunately, over nine months was wasted in finding this out. The nine months translated into millions of dollars in lost revenue. However, the costs were still there.

What are some of the lessons learned from this example?

  • You cannot assume everything is fine even though you hear no complaints. Management at headquarters was over-trusting of the assigned manager and did not verify status of the project.

  • Be careful in assigning one local manager to oversee a regional project. Just the same as for assigning someone from headquarters.

  • Force the manager to report on issues and problems from the start of the project on an ongoing basis. This gives the basis for tracking work.

Instead of just replacing the manager, the decision was made to institute the two-level steering committee approach presented earlier in this chapter. The executive steering committee included managers from headquarters as well as from each country. The working level steering committees were organized by function across the region. There was a big debate as to whether they should be organized by country. This was rejected (and rightly so) because it would just support more isolation between the offices in the different countries. Steering committees were established for marketing, sales, application processing, payments, servicing, collections, and accounting.




International Project Management
International Project Management: Leadership in Complex Environments
ISBN: 0470578823
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 154

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