Page 113 - Global Project Management Handbook

5-2 STATE OF THE ART OF GLOBAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

To succeed in our rapidly changing, interactive, and interconnected business environ-
ment, companies are continuously searching for ways to improve effectiveness. They
look for partners that can perform the needed work better, cheaper, and faster. This
results in alliances across the globe, ranging from research and development (R&D) to
manufacturing and from customer relations to field services. Estimates suggest that within
the United States alone, over 8 million employees are part of such distributed teams. 23
These geographically dispersed workgroups have become an important competitive tool
in a business environment characterized by highly mobile resources, skill sets, and tech-
nology transfers across global regions and multinational borders. Companies that sur-
vive and prosper in today’s amalgamated global marketplace continuously find new
and innovative ways to integrate their resources and to develop, produce, and market
products and services more cost-effectively, more timely, and at higher value to their
customers. 1,3,5,6,14,16,26 However, all this also represents great managerial challenges.

MANAGERIAL CHALLENGES IN MULTINATIONAL
TEAM ENVIRONMENTS

Managing teamwork is challenging, even in its most basic form. It involves intricately
connected organizational systems, behavioral issues, and work processes. 9,18,25,38,62,65 It
also has been changing over the years with increasing project complexities and team
efforts that span organizational lines, including an intricate functional spectrum of
assigned personnel, support groups, subcontractors, vendors, partners, government agen-
cies, and customer organizations. 33,43 Uncertainties and risks introduced by technologi-
cal, economic, political, social, and regulatory factors are always present and can be an
enormous challenge to organizing and managing project teams. All this has led to new
concepts, managerial principles, and practices that have changed the organizational land-
scape. This changed landscape has been labeled teamwork as a new managerial frontier
and is summarized in the following box. Additional challenges are yet created by focusing
on geographically distributed teams. 1,22,29 While for conventional projects the direction
toward project objectives, technology transfer, project integration, and business strategy
comes mostly from one central location, for globally dispersed teams, these directions
are shared and distributed geographically. 10,13,19,26,30,41 Furthermore, the linkages among

individual work components need to be developed and effectively “managed” across
countries and organizational cultures, as shown graphically in Fig. 5.1. Multinational pro-
jects not only need to be integrated across the miles, but they also must be unified among
different business processes, management styles, operational support systems, and orga-
nizational cultures. 13,16,22,29,33,44 As a result, organizations that manage projects across
international borders often find it highly challenging and frustrating to implement their
project plans, even with carefully prepared and mutually agreed-on contracts. In addition,
company management itself, including its top executives, are often distributed geographi-
cally, separated by distance, time zones, and organizational cultures. 58 As companies
engage in more multinational joint developments, outsourcing, and global expansion, 46,57
virtual teams promise the flexibility, responsiveness, cost advantage, and improved resource
utilization necessary to survive and prosper in our ultracompetitive environment. 38,55

Technology: A New Paradigm
Technology in both the work and its support systems creates additional challenges
reflected in the complexities of the work and its processes. It affects the people, their skill