Page 115 - Global Project Management Handbook

5-4 STATE OF THE ART OF GLOBAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

FIGURE 5.1 Multinational team environment.

just 10 people, it is interconnected with the rest of the world and can work with any per-
son from any enterprise in any place at any time. This opens up great opportunities and
flexibilities of conducting business, including codevelopments, partnering, joint ven-
tures, strategic alliances, and outsourcing, as well as customer and supplier relations
management. However, even the best technology cannot solve all problems. Nor can it
by itself ensure unified teamwork, cooperation, decision making, and task integration.
Effectively handling these challenges requires a great deal of cross-cultural and interper-
sonal sensitivity, special management skills, and administrative support systems. 62
Taken together, five organizational subsystems make globally dispersed project teams
unique and influence the situational leadership style most appropriate: (1) business envi-
ronment, (2) project work, (3) team culture, (4) work process, and (5) managerial tools
and techniques, as shown graphically in Fig. 5.2 and summarized below.

Multinational Business Environment

Businesses that extend globally operate in a highly dynamic environment regarding market
structure, suppliers, and regulations. Local operations are highly intricate and enormously
diverse regarding organizational culture, structure, and management philosophy.
Managers have to deal with differences in languages, time zones, organizational and per-
sonal cultures, policies, regulations, business processes, and political climate. 2,11,33,45
These complexities call for specialized work processes, new concepts of technology and
knowledge transfer, and more sophisticated management skills and project leadership.

Project Work
The complexity of project work, as well as its scope and risks, represents yet another
dimension of multinational management challenges. Large and technologically complex