Page 123 - Global Project Management Handbook

5-12 STATE OF THE ART OF GLOBAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

stimulating environment also seems to lower communication barriers and conflict and
enhances the desire of personnel to succeed. Further, this seems to increase organiza-
tional awareness as well as the ability to respond to changing project requirements.
In addition, an effective team has good leadership. Team managers understand the
task, the people, the organization, and all the factors crucial to success. They are action-
oriented, provide the needed resources, properly direct implementation of the project
plan, and help in the identification and resolution of problems in their early stages.
Management and team leaders can help a great deal in keeping the project team
focused. They must communicate and update organizational objectives and relate them to
the project and its specific activities in various functional areas and geographic regions.
Management can help in developing priorities by communicating the project parameters
and organizational needs and by establishing a clear project focus. While operationally
the project might have to be fine-tuned to changing environments and evolving solutions,
the top-down mission and project objectives should remain stable. Project team members
need this stability to plan and organize their work toward unified results. This focus is
also necessary for establishing benchmarks and integrating innovative activities across all
disciplines. Moreover, establishing this clear goal focus stimulates interest in the project
and unifies the team, ultimately helping to refuel the commitment to established project
objectives in such crucial areas as technical performance, timing, and budgets. Effective
team leaders monitor their team environments for early warning signs of potential prob-
lems and changing performance levels.

BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMING GLOBAL TEAMS

As more companies compete on a global scale and transfer knowledge across multina-
tional boundaries, their project operations have become vastly more complex. The recom-
mendations advanced here reflect the realities of this new environment where project
managers have to cross organizational, national, and cultural boundaries and work with
people over whom they have little or no formal control. Alliances and collaborative ven-
tures have forced project managers to focus more on cross-boundary relationships, nego-
tiations, delegation, and commitment rather than on establishing formal command and
control systems.

In fact, global teams rarely can be managed top-down. Given the realities of multina-
tional project environments—with their cultural diversities, organizational complexities,
decision processes distributed throughout the world, and solutions often evolving incre-
mentally and iteratively—project leaders have to rely on information and judgments by
their local team leaders. Power and responsibility are shifting from managers to local proj-
ect team leaders and their members who take higher levels of responsibility, authority, and
control for project results. That is, these teams become self-directed, gradually replacing
the more traditional, hierarchically structured project team. These processes rely strongly
on group interaction, resource and power sharing, group decision making, accountability,
and self-direction and control. Leading such self-directed teams also requires a great deal
of emotional intelligence, team management skills, and overall guidance by senior
management.
Taken together, no work group comes fully integrated and unified in its values and
skill sets but needs to be nurtured and developed skillfully. Leaders must recognize the
professional interests, anxieties, communication needs, and challenges facing their team
members and anticipate them as the team goes through the various stages of integration.
That is, project leaders must foster an environment where team members can work
together across organizational and national boundaries in a flatter and leaner company