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| Managing
Across Cultures |
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Projects
in many industries are increasingly being performed on a
global basis by virtual teams. The lack of direct personal
contact between project team members, who may or may not
have the same employer and almost certainly operate in different
cultural and work environments, can lead to project execution
issues.
This situation emphasizes the criticality of sensitizing
project managers to the nuances of the various cultural
environments in which the project is being executed. For
example, different cultures place varying emphases on important
factors such as age and gender. While in an ideal world
such factors would not matter, in the real world they do,
especially when managing a culturally-diverse project team.
This talk will address both the problems associated with
managing projects across cultures, as well as provide some
insights into how to address common issues that emerge when
executing projects globally.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify
the challenges of "managing across cultures"
and define the specific parameters that lead to those
challenges (e.g., age, gender, language, customs, etc.)
- Present
case studies regarding specific situations commonly encountered
by project managers with global, virtual teams, and explore
the various options for resolving the situation in the
most productive and amicable manner.
- Summarize
the learnings from the case studies, and present some
general "rules of the road" for managing global,
culturally-diverse project teams.
|
 Mr.
Gurbaxani has 20+ years of experience as a technology project
manager and consultant. He has worked for the past 10 years
as a program manager and consultant in the customer service
/ technical support areas. He has worked with a number of
Fortune 500 companies in a wide variety of industries to help
them implement state-of-the-art contact center technologies
and improve operational efficiencies. His most recent experiences
have been with customers in the digital broadband (telecom/cable),
consumer electronics, and professional services industries.
His specialty is helping managers measure their organization's
baseline performance, use those measures to suggest tactical
and strategic improvement initiatives, implement new technologies
and processes aimed at realizing operational improvement,
and establish as well as achieve targeted improvement metrics.
During the past ten years working for leading customer service
software vendors, he has successfully delivered multiple implementations
making extensive use of offshore development resources (primarily
in India). He has written numerous technology and PM-related
articles and presented them at a number of forums, most recently
presenting the talk entitled "Measuring Global Project
Performance and Value" at the PMI South Caribbean Chapter
4th annual PM Conference, held in Trinidad & Tobago (Sept.,
2007).
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Project
Management Institute Atlanta Chapter
Professional Development
Days • 2008 ©
2008 PMI® Atlanta Chapter