Page 329 - Global Project Management Handbook

16-16 MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL PROGRAMS AND PROJECTS

fast time-to-market leader in software development, general rules for VGS team
behavior may include allowing overlapping phases, combining milestones, and spending
additional money to speed up the project: “You are using a process as a tool to get the
desired results, not as a weight around your neck to slow you down.”
Here, having a checks-and-balances system is important. The system should provide a
mechanism to ensure that any of the defined behaviors—and the actions stemming from
them—are not over the limit set by the checks-and-balance system (e.g., additional
money can be spent up to 5 percent of initial requested budget).

Project Culture
There are three tactical success factors in this group. The first one—building a high-
performance project culture—is an enabler of the second factor—creating awareness of
cross-cultural differences. When such awareness exists, it is possible to recognize how big
or small cross-cultural distances among cultural groups in a VGS team are. The existence
of the awareness and the distances that are understood and recognized drive the development
of culturally responsive strategies to deal with potential problems (the third factor).

CSF8
CSF7
CSF9

CSF7: Building a High-performance Project Culture. Projects exist to deliver results
that support organizational goals. Therefore, a parent company must build a high-
performance culture and ethic that gives people both the confidence and capabilities to
visualize the best way to deliver the results. The discipline with which such compa-
nies define and pursue their goals serves as a beacon to their employees as to how to
behave. Such companies offer fertile ground for the growth of high-performance pro-
jects and teams not only by creating performance challenges but also by setting clear
performance expectations and sending a message that results matter. It is for these
reasons that it is of vital importance that senior management creates a high-

performance corporate culture. How strongly this type of culture is ingrained in the
minds of team members in a world-class company can be seen in a statement from an
American project manager doing a VGS project in England: “In the world of our com-
pany, you know, we are very results-driven. If you can’t demonstrate your success,
then you have not accomplished anything.”
Taking over from there, the VGS project manager should build a specific project cul-
ture, expressed as a set of clearly articulated performance-oriented values that are
designed into project management practices/behaviors and then uniformly practiced in the
project. For example, one such value is “being proactive,” where team members practice
a behavior of periodic progress reporting that includes predicting the schedule and budget
at completion of their tasks. The intention here is that project team members have a sense
of identity with the cultural values and accept the need to invest both materially and emo-
tionally in their project. This should make them more engaged, committed, enthusiastic,
and willing to support each other in accomplishing the project goals. As a result, they
should work harder and be more effective, thereby increasing success.

CSF8: Create Awareness of Cross-Cultural Differences. One of the toughest chal-
lenges in cross-cultural interactions is to learn that “they” (e.g., developers in Russia)
are different from “us” (e.g., project managers from the United States). To overcome