Approach


As you saw from the purposes and the scope, the range of things to be considered goes beyond just getting people on the team. In addition, international projects have more risk and potential problems than many one-location projects. These factors point to the need for taking a different approach. You cannot just go out and get team members. You have to first think about where the areas of risk are in the project. Then you can begin to address how to organize the project using the knowledge of where the risk is. After this you can start lining up team members and do work.

Identify Areas Of Project Risk

There are chapters in the last part of the book that deal with handling specific risks that you might encounter across an international project. Here we will concentrate on risks that you are likely to meet up with at the start. Some of these, hopefully, will already have been addressed in the work of the project concept addressed in Chapters 1 and 2. Before we begin, the term “risk” should be discussed. Risk is a rather fuzzy concept. It is slightly different to each person. There is a need for a common definition. Throughout the book and for the past two decades, we have used the following definition:

A part of the project such as a task, subproject, or milestone has risk if there is one or more significant issue related to the part of the project.

This definition makes risk more precise. Now earlier in Chapter 2 you defined the project concept, which included identifying potential issues associated with the project. You also defined the general areas of the project. It is now time to associate these. You can use the table in Fig. 4.1. In this figure the first column lists the areas of the project. Some sample areas are given as an example. Then the second column indicates the issues that could arise for that part of the project. The third column contains any comments.

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Figure 4.1: Association of Issues with Areas of the International Project

Let’s now consider some of the typical issues that you are probably going to encounter.

  • Get local management buy-in and support. Almost all local managers will tell you that they will support the project. Talk is cheap, so they say. The real test is whether they are willing to assign resources to the project and participate in managerial work in the project.

  • Identify and obtain team members for the project.

  • Build teamwork and collaboration within the team. This is easier said than done. Many of the problems in international projects stem from talking teamwork, but then not establishing an approach in the team to ensure that collaboration is achieved.

Specific project areas may have risk. This depends on the specific project, but a general area of risk is where two locations have to work together in integrating their work. Examples can be substructures in engineering projects, software programs, business processes, etc.

Define Team Member Requirements For Success

Once you have identified the areas of risk and associated areas of the project, you are ready to organize the project. In an international project there are different types of team members, including:

  • Team members who are key to the project in terms of being required throughout the project and who have to interact with other locations, including headquarters. An example might be a design engineer. These individuals will be called critical team members.

  • Team members who do work in the project locally that only affects the local part of the project. An example might be someone who performs facilities work to support the project. These people will be referred to as locally focused team members. They have limited interaction with headquarters or other locations. Some of these people may be at headquarters as well as local offices.

  • Individuals who perform very limited, but significant tasks in the project and then have no other role in the project. These will be called cameo members. They walk in and walk out—like a movie.

Note that no distinction was made between employees and contractors. This is by intent. In a team you generally do not distinguish between these in terms of work. Of course, managing contractors or consultants is a major topic in international projects. So there is an entire chapter devoted to this (Chapter 8).

You can now return to the table in Fig. 4.1 and create a new table. In this table you will list the areas of the project in the first column, borrowing from Fig. 4.1. In the second column you will indicate the type of team members required for that part of the project. In the third column you will list specific needs and skill requirements for the personnel in this area. How will you use this? For one thing it will help you when you go to managers and make requests for people for the team. A second use is when you interview the potential team members to determine their fit with the project. The structure of this table is given in Fig. 4.2.

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Figure 4.2: Types of Team Members Needed by Project Area

You can also create a table of areas of the project versus skill requirements (see Fig. 4.3). Here the table entry can be an “X” or blank, or you can put in specific requirements. This table is useful when you go to management to indicate the project structure and the types of people you need.

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Figure 4.3: Areas of the Project versus Skills Needed

There is a strong political lesson learned here with these two tables. In order to be credible to managers when you start an international project, you must show them that you are organized. This is not just a good project plan and concept; it is also that you are on top of what you require in terms of people. There is also a business need for preparing these tables—planning the staging of staff. You neither want nor need all of the team members on day 1 of the project. Some people will be entering the project at later stages. So you must have a plan for when these people are needed to be able to arrange for staffing.

Attributes Of Team Members

It is not just technical or business knowledge and experience that counts. There are a number of other important attributes for the team that are especially important to international projects. You will want to use this list when you prepare and conduct interviews of potential team members.

Some key attributes for international team members are listed below. To be useful, interview guidelines for each attribute have been included.

  • Experience in terms of projects similar to your project. This is obviously important. How do you test for this? You can ask for experience, but you are likely to get general words. A better approach is to ask what issues they encountered in their past projects. Also, ask what lessons learned did they get out of the previous project.

  • Previous experience in international projects. This is similar to the first one. However, you want to probe into their role in the international project. You can make inferences from what they indicate as issues and lessons learned. You are trying to ascertain if they performed critical work or locally focused work. If they did good local work, this is not a sure sign of success in moving up to a critical role in the project.

  • Ability to work with other people on tasks and work. You will want to test this several ways. You want to ask them what problems they encountered when they worked with other people. If they indicate that there were no problems, then you can probably infer that they did not work much with others. Working with people in foreign countries is never smooth. There should be issues. Another test will occur early in the project.

  • Ability to solve problems and work within the organization. Problem solving is a critical skill in international projects because there will not always be help immediately at hand. Some critical team members will have to make judgment calls on the spot. Take the issues from the past four chapters and extract two or three of these. Ask them if they have encountered them and what they would do if they were faced with them.

  • Sensitivity to issues and potential problems. Some people focus entirely on the work. Problems and issues may arise, but they do not give them much attention. Here you can pose specific situations and ask them how they would respond.

  • Availability from their other work to perform tasks on the project. For almost all projects in the late twentieth and the current century, people are spread among many different types of work. They must juggle their time between work on your project with work on other projects as well as nonproject work. You must assume that there will be conflicts—even if they indicate that this is not the case. Pose the conflict issue directly. Give them the following situation and see what they do. They are doing work on your project and one of their managers comes to them and asks them to do something else immediately. What would they do?

  • Communication skills. The ability to get along and communicate with managers and other employees is critical. There are several ways to get at communication skills. You can ask about issues and problems that they have had. You can also pose a situation and see how they would respond. Also, ask them how they would organize communications in the team. How would they find out about status of the project, for example?

  • Ambition and energy. This is a hard one to evaluate. You can try and assess the volume and nature of work that they have performed. Here is a method we have used effectively. Have them take their resume and with their knowledge of the project, have them prepare an updated resume that reflects the experience at the end of the project assuming that it is completed. This will work in any country or culture and reveals self-interest. If the resumes are the same, then their expectations for themselves in the project are very low. Not a good sign. Another technique is to pose a situation in which they must complete a great deal of work in a short amount of time. Find out how they respond.

  • Knowledge of the organization’s business processes. Typically, your project will involve some business processes in the organization. Ask them how the current process works. Have them identify problems and issues with the current process.

  • Knowledge of the methods and tools that will be employed in the project. In the project concept you defined some of the major methods and tools that will be employed. Many people will list the various tools or methods they are familiar with on their resumes. But resumes are just paper. You need to test their knowledge of the specific method or tool. Ask them how they employed the method or tool. What are some of the problems with the method or tool? What are gaps where the method or tool fails?

  • Ability to cope with different cultures. This links to their work with other team members in doing tasks together. Move away from projects and work and ask about their hobbies. Do they like to travel? Where have they gone? What type of foods do they like? If they don’t like to travel and prefer a fairly regimented life, then this could be a problem.

  • Ability and willingness to travel for an extended period of time. Many people will indicate that they don’t mind traveling. But when the rubber meets the road, there are problems. So you need to probe about what they do off the job. How old are their children? Does any family member have some specific need or problem? Then pose the situation of a month-long trip to some location halfway around the world. How would they communicate with their family? Getting this answer will tell you a great deal about whether they have thought this through. They may think that they can reduce the travel once they are on the team.

  • Multilingual capability or at least the ability to work hard at understanding and getting ideas across. This relates to travel, culture, and communications. Are they willing to learn about other cultures and languages? What would they do to gather information? How could they use the web?

Of course, it depends on the type of team member and their role as to what you emphasize. For the critical team member type you will want to use all of these. You will likely value problem solving, communicating, collaboration, and related skills as important or more important than specific technical knowledge. For the locally focused team members you will focus more on their business and technical knowledge and skills. However, the ability to get along with others is still important. For the cameo member you will focus on their capabilities along with being able to deal with issues and work within the scope of defined tasks.

Identify And Select Team Members

You have identified requirements for team members. Now the job is to actually find the team members. Questions for interviewing specific individuals are found in the next section. A common approach is to start at headquarters and find the team members there and then to move out to regional and local locations. This is not a good idea. It reinforces the mentality of the centralized project that cares little about what goes on in the local offices—where the money is really made.

So let’s step back and look for a better strategy. You know what you want. At headquarters getting people will be relatively easy from a political point of view. The risk is in the local offices. So that is where you should focus your efforts first. You should line up the people who are needed for local work. This is what was termed locally focused team members earlier. Why is this a good place to start? Here are some reasons.

  • You need to build rapport with the local managers so that they are aware and supportive of the project.

  • Getting the local managers to commit their people to locally focused work is a good political test of their commitment and involvement. Locally focused work tends to take less effort than that of a critical team member who will have to spend more time away from their current work.

You now travel some thousands of miles through a smelly airplane and airport and arrive at the office. You go to sleep and go to the local office the next day. You arrive at the office. The manager is expecting you. He or she expresses happiness to see you and to be involved in the project. This may really be insincere. The person may really be thinking “What can I do to get this person out of here as soon as possible?” You should assume that this is the attitude. Immediately, you should indicate that you are aware of their many activities going on and that you don’t want to place a burden on them with the project. Do not under any circumstances stress that this is a corporate project and that they must cooperate. There will be verbal agreement and then you will later be knifed in the back. After you have covered the sensitivities, indicate that they know that there are many corporate projects and that here is another one. Then go into the benefits for them in terms of what was discussed in Chapter 2. Indicate that you want the project to proceed with as least pain on them as possible. Also, indicate that they could assign people who are not firing on all cylinders. As an aside, we have other phrases—these are: “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” or the “wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.” Basically, you are appealing to their self-interest. To minimize the pain on them, they need to assign someone who can do the work and who is not incompetent.

After this discussion you can move on to the core team or critical team members if they are potentially to come from this location. You should state that it is in their interest to name someone who can participate to avoid potential problems later. Also, by using their own people they will have more say in the project later. This is politically useful point to bring out.

In the previous section some of the items to cover with potential team members were listed. For a new team member who has been brought on board the project, you want to discuss the following items:

  • Your expectations of them;

  • Their expectations of the project and benefits to them;

  • Time conflicts and other problems that arise during the project;

  • Turnover of their current work to others so that they can spend time on the project.

Now let’s return to headquarters. Often, it is not hard to find people to take on the project. How is it that headquarters offices have many people available on call? We don’t know, but you are taking advantage of this by going to the region first. Now let’s suppose after explaining the purpose of the project and work that you run into resistance. A manager, for example, states that he or she “has no one available.” Now you can state that the local offices have made people available and that management is behind the project. There is just no place to hide. They must give you decent people soon—or else!! Don’t you see the strategy? You are using the support of the local offices from afar and that of management from above to put pressure on these middle level headquarters managers.

There is one issue that comes up frequently. That is that a manager assigns someone who is not appropriate to the project, but who is not being used effectively in the department. What do you do? Here are some ideas. First, indicate that the needs that you are stating now are temporary and that there will be future needs. This leaves the door open for future requirements and changes. Next, evaluate the person right away. Assess whether they are suitable or whether they are a “turkey.” If they are the latter, then you can go to the manager and indicate that you know that they are not really the right person for the project, but that you will make the best of the situation. In return, you indicate that they may be returned from the project for others. Also, indicate that they owe you—big time. What do you want? Help in resolving political and other issues. In other words, you can leverage a weakness into a strength!!

Build A Team Mentality

Team building begins with the kickoff meeting for the project. In an international project it is important that all of the critical team members attend the meeting in person. If the budget is tight, then you can resort to videoconferencing. In the first meeting it is important to instill a common sense of purpose and goal. You also want to address some of the potential problems that will arise. Figure 4.4 gives a checklist along with comments.

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Figure 4.4: Topics to Cover in the Kickoff Meeting for the International Project

We take teamwork and a team mentality very seriously—not just pay lip service to it. Here are six proven ways to instill a greater degree of teamwork and a team consciousness. Throughout the book other opportunities for collaboration will be given.

The first place to build the team approach is in the planning of the work. In the next chapter, a collaborative approach will be taken in creating the detailed schedule or work plan. Here there are six specific actions you can take to implement teamwork. Do these things early in the project and keep them going. You will build a successful pattern of collaboration that will last beyond the project end date.

In terms of the work itself in an international project, it is useful to assign 40% of the tasks to be jointly shared among two team members. Of course, you always must have one in charge of each task. However, assigning the tasks to two people reinforces that when you want teamwork, you support your statement. Remember that actions in project management are more important often than words. If possible, assign tasks to one person at one location and one at another. Let them work through the communications.

Taking task assignments further, you should rotate team members among tasks so that different team members work with each other through the project. This is obviously not possible in a short project, but can be done in a project of six months or longer.

A fourth area for team building is in addressing issues. While team members cannot solve all or even many issues, they can participate by sharing their views on specific problems or opportunities.

Lessons learned is a fifth activity for teamwork. In this book the approach is collaborative. In international projects you have to create opportunities for team building. One such is the sharing of lessons learned across the project.

Finally, a sixth opportunity for teamwork is in presentations. Team members who worked on the same tasks can make presentations together.

How can you determine if you are succeeding in building a team mentality? Here are some questions to answer:

  • Sit down where the team members take breaks. Are the team members talking about their tasks and work together? If so, this is a good sign—even if they are talking about problems.

  • Watch the body language and how team members interact with each other. Are they showing each other respect? Does their conversation reflect previous communications?

There is a major reason to instilling team work beyond quality of work in the international project. It is drive and desire to see the project work through. This will help you and the project when diversions and other opportunities arise. The team member will be more likely to remain in the project since they have a sense of belonging.

Replace Team Members

In a project of any duration team members come and go. This is natural. You cannot afford to plan for the transition of the team members. Let’s divide this discussion into two parts—the departing team member and the new team member.

Assume that all team members will be leaving. This means that you must make an effort as a manager to ensure that there is a capture of information and knowledge from the departing team member to the rest of the team. If you have organized many of the tasks as joint, this is less of a burden since there is some degree of backup. Have team members present their work in team meetings on a regular basis. Since this becomes routine, it is non-threatening to the people. They don’t feel singled out for attention.

Another guideline is to state to the team that some of them will likely be pulled from the project for other work. Indicate that you expect and anticipate this. Also, indicate that you expect them to keep the project leaders apprised of potential developments that would take them from the project. Keep an early warning system by staying in touch with the team members.

Now let’s assume that a team member is leaving within two weeks and that they have been working mainly alone. What steps should you take?

  • Review the current work assignments for the individual and determine the status of the work.

  • Talk with the departing team member about their work. Ask them about issues in their work. Discuss these issues openly. Look for loose ends. Solicit ideas for people that they think might be useful to the project.

  • Move to assign other team members to work with them to get overlap. Oversee directly the early meetings in the transition. Have them develop a small checklist of things to do in the transition.

  • If possible, have the remaining team members do some of the work of the departing team member. This will validate that there has been a transfer of knowledge.

  • For the departing team member volunteer to help them. Get out the resume that was current at the start of the project and the one they developed for the end of the project. Review this with them. Always volunteer to write an evaluation letter for their personnel file. This is true even for cameo members.

Taking these steps will provide a number of benefits. First, you show that you care about the well being of the team members. This will help with the remaining members of the team. Second, you show that you have an organized approach for dealing with transition.

Now let’s turn to the problem of getting someone to replace the departing team member. Here you want to follow an organized approach. Here are some useful steps.

  • Step 1: Review the project plan and the work to date.

  • Step 2: Identify the open issues and problem areas that you have. Also, review and update the tables related to skills that you developed earlier in this chapter. These two actions will help to give you a better idea of what type of person you need. In general, you don’t want to replace someone with someone who is like the departing person.

  • Step 3: Create a small list of characteristics and experience that you think would be most suitable for the project.

After you have carried out these two steps, you have a better idea of what would be most useful to assist the project. Next, you will have to approach either headquarters or local managers to get a new team member. Don’t present the situation as a problem. Instead, present it as an opportunity to involve more people in the project. Also, indicate that you support their reassignment since there is other important work to be done. Point out the areas where the project could most use additional help. Show them the list from Step 3 above. Don’t insist on getting a specific person unless there is one person who is absolutely critical. Instead, make suggestions of other people.

Now let’s assume that you have a new team member that has been assigned to the project. Pursue these actions:

  • Interview them as was done earlier in this chapter.

  • Bring them up-to-date on the project by presenting the original goal and scope of the project. Be open about what issues have been encountered and solved. Point out to them the open issues and areas of the project that have risk.

  • Present their area of the project to them. Show them the tasks that were originally created by the departing team member. Send them away to think about the tasks and to develop their own task list.

  • Introduce them to team members with whom they will be sharing tasks.

  • Follow the guideline related to creating a revised and updated resume for the end of the project.

This last action is important because it gets them involved in the project. Your objective is to several-fold. First, you want to obtain an assessment that this is the right person for the work. Second, you want to get them involved and committed to the project.

After reviewing their plan for their work, have them introduced to the project team in a project meeting. Get them to discuss their background and lessons learned from past projects. Next, assign some of their tasks jointly. This has several benefits. First, it gets collaboration going right away for them. Second, the current team members will probably get back to you on what they think of their skills—not bad information to have.

Manage Team Members

Now you have the team on board. You have established joint tasks. Everything should be fine, right? Wrong. There are many operational problems that can be encountered. Let’s start with the day-to-day operations. You should gather status from the team members in person. Don’t use e-mail. That just masks what is really going on. If the team member is remote, then you should use the telephone. Use voice mail where you can pick up their tone of voice.

How do you really determine what is going on? Do not ask for status. Instead, ask how things are going. Look at their facial expressions and listen to their voice. That will tell a lot about what is really true. Then ask about what problems they are having. Ask what else they are working on. Express sympathy for them being split between their other work and that of the project. These steps will help to draw the team member out. Probe then for detail. Discuss the detail for some time. This will give you a better understanding of what they are doing as well as showing sympathy for their work. Then start to probe issues. What is getting in their way? What do they need?

Listen for statements related to work and personal problems. For work problems log these mentally so that you can later take them up with their managers. For personal problems, ask them how you can help. Let’s take an example. Suppose that they state they are under a lot of stress from work. After asking more questions, you find that the reason is that they are needed at home more.

Now you can zoom in on this issue and see what you can do to ease the problem. Give them a day off. Have them work at home for three days.




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

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