Lessons Learned Risk Policy 2009 Summer

The fourth PMBOK Café explored the Risks involved with Managing Global Projects. Global Projects have additional risks that must be identified, monitored and controlled.

Political Regulational and Economic Risks are dynamic and have a huge impact on global projects. To deal with these risks Project Managers need to have smart research strategies. Examples of Political Risk that were presented in the Café were projects involving North Korean facilities with South Korean employees. North Korea released South Korea's Hyundai Asan worker on Thursday after four-and-a-half months of detention amid an ongoing visit by the company's chairwoman, Jung Un, Hyun and Project member, Mr. Yu Seong-jin, detained in North Korea for 136 days.

Global Projects are also subjected to Currency Exchange risks. Managing these risks involve hedging against a currency change that might impact the project.

Global Projects also involve a significant Socio-Cultural risk that are difficult to manage due to cultural differences. This cultural gap impacts communication and trust. If different cultures cannot trust each other for example differences in high context and low context countries there is a risk the project will run into difficulties.

Global Markets impact Projects because of rapidly changing competitive conditions. Shifting market conditions may cause external changes to scope requirements. Project Managers should actively gather information and analyze the data. If there is a need the Project Manager should trigger risk response strategies.

Lessons Learned Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder Management we talked about specific people on projects.   ‘A stakeholder is a person or group who has a direct interest and impact on the project outcome and determines whether the project is a success or not’ Kathy Schwalbe, 2006) .

Stakeholder Relations

Global Projects have more complexity because of time and place.  This workshop focused on what are the practical things we can do to perform Project Management better.  The goal is to create a project culture where people can flourish.  This session had 13 Project Management Professionals from 5 countries.  It was a great multi-cultural environment where basic concepts were debated.  We networked outside of the Workshop and we collected almost 20 responses from a Linked-In discussion groups.

The main question for the workshop was. "how might we manage people, who are separated by languages, culture, time and place?  How can we set expectations, keep our team members happy despite cultural differences? How can we define done?  Allot of the discussions focused on taking the time to create a shared value among teams is important.  There was advice on how to plan travel to include cultural activities.  Alternatively, some people felt that email, English and ethics were all we really need.

Communication and Culture

This was a recurring theme.  Communication is a cause for failure. Differences in culture are a risk.  Ways to mitigate against Culture failures are; to have an open mindset, positive thinking and respect for each other.

Project Managers must work to remove barriers to communication.  For example technology and travel.  Use as much technology as needed.  Email is the primary method to communicate, but voice and video should be used to communicate as needed.  If email, voice and video can;t remove the barriers, travel is important for building relationships.  During the lessons learned phase, it is good practice to look at the variance of planned versus actual and examine was communication a factor. Successful communication means successful projects.  Project Managers need to fill in the gaps between cultures, setting the common rules can overcome some of these culture communication gaps. Solving communication problems is better project management.

Team Management

Team Management focused on how to manage teams.  Like communication, teams are focused on people.  How we manage people influences project outcomes.  The Japanese concept of "Ten people, ten colors", means that it is common to have a difference of opinions on teams.  Differences need to be reconciled so that all team members share one vision.  The dream is for the team to become a family.  How to do it is to have respect and trust.

Team performance is critical for project success, global teams have issues with culture, language, time and the application in which to communicate with each other.  The main ways to overcome these are to have transparency and shared mission value on teams. Building a team is a key to a strong business and success.  Teams that can function as a family are guaranteed success.

Managing Customer Requirements

Happy Scope.  To manage difficult customers, requires understanding that they may not be able to express the requirements in detail.  Lack of information, Ambiguity and the Wrong Information are problems that contribute to project failure. The best way to solve this problem is to reduce the scope and produce the prototype.  While Risk can not be eliminated by reducing assumptions we can reduce the risk of project failure.  Their phrase is "No Assumptions equals No Risk".  The practical way to accomplish this is to have a clear road-map.  First Collect and define the requirements, next analysis find the gaps where are the assumptions, third Visualize by prototyping.

Global Projects require that determing what the customer wants takes more time to confirm the requirments and prototyping to confirm the quality.

Summary

This Second PMBOK Cafe was very interesting. The most interesting time was the discussions.  People passionately and actively discussed this topic in detail. The quality of the presentation, in terms of content of the presenters was very good. All of the Project Managers who have experience agreed that having good communication, a shared team culture were important for managing global projects.  Especially in the requirements phase.  Collecting requirements and communicating them has an extra layer of difficulty when we have multiple cultures participating.  Good projects allow more time when collecting requirements from global projects.  Not only collecting the explicit details that are captured in data and forms, but take the time to get to know each other as people.  Will Ames "The key ingredients are United Airlines and Asahi Beer." http://bit.ly/Cs9t9.

On behalf of myself Robert Higgins, Rajeev Supekar and Melinda Liow we would like to thank everyone for collaborating and working together on Project Management Knowledge.

Day 1

2009, 08, 08 The first day of PMBOK Cafe was experimental.  Twenty Project Management Professionals gathered for the Global Project Management workshop.  The opening presentation talked about Building Trust, Resolving Conflict and Acting on Shard Knowledge. 

People first worked on their own thinking about the future of Project Management.  What are the skills, tools and techniques we will use in 2012.

These ideas were assembled into affinity diagrams.  The main concepts that emerged were Communication, Technology, Organization and "Crazy" integrated ideas.  One of the interesting ideas that emerged was the use of technology to be able to alert Project Managers to psychological issues.

The main concepts were discussed as a group.  The people had a nice mix of cross discipline project experiences.  While it was chaotic to assemble divergent ideas into a cohesive knowledge map.  People created an ideal shared space that was extremely interactive.  The deliverables were the "Knowledge Clouds" which were mostly conversations with some pictures, words and ideas.

Most of the knowledge was intangible, difficult to express and people were relating their personal experiences.  The discussions were very lively and the workshop was buzzing with creative energy.

Day 2

2009, 08, 09 The second day of PMBOK Cafe focused on converting the buzz from the first day into something that is explicit and can be communicated to a wider audience.  The goal of the second day was team Presentations.  Each team was allowed to plan their schedule and allocate their resources and their time to produce a presentation on their "Knowledge Clouds".  This was a challenging goal, because of the rich discussions from the first day.

Participants learned how to use some collaborative technology, for example Google Documents to allow more than one person to work on a document or a presentation at the same time.  There were some technology bumps from so many people collaborating together in one space.  Teams were able to survey each other and get feedback on some of their concepts.

The presentations were all excellent on their verbal content.  Each team was able to convey their knowledge and discussions after each presentation were very interesting.

If there was a general theme to emerge it was that, In 2012 Global Organizations need to use technology to flatten the communication among team members.  Information needs to be more shared, granular and real-time with the ability to capture the work in progress.  In general Japanese Corporations are very rigid Functional Organizations.  Project Managers would be given more power and responsibility in decision making.

An effect of flatter organizations, might lead to more stress.  More responsibility can create more stress for team members.

The intangible parts of project management for example Happiness of Team members needs to be monitored. In 2012 Project Mangers need to have  system that can help People detect stress across cultures and time zones and alert the right response teams to help.

While technology can not solve all of Project Managers problems, participants generally agreed that better technology can improve the trust of team members, organizations need flatter communication structures that can improve the velocity of communication and aid in decision making. Lastly, technology can alert people about team members feelings and improve the soft side of Project Management.

On behalf of myslef Robert Higgins, Rajeev Supekar and Melinda Liow we would like to thank everyone for collaborating and working together on Project Management Knowledge.

Japanese Best Practices of Project Management

Introduction

The Third PMBOK Cafe brainstormed, discussed in detail and presented concrete ideas on Japanese Project Management Best Practices. Participants and Facilitators were from Japan, India, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The workshop looked at a scenario of How a Japanese Project might train a mixed group of International Project Managers to build a high performing team. The Japanese have been performing global projects for millennia. For example Horyuji temple is an example of a project that spanned generations and four nations 1,300 years ago. It is a Buddhist temple complex in Nara Japan. The temples stakeholders were the Imperial Family, Indian Buddhism, Korean Technology Transfer with Chinese Architectural designs. The Japanese have been adapting and incorporating Western Project Management epistemology and in fact many of the Concepts of Project Management in regards to Quality and Human Resource Management can be sourced to have originated in Japan.

Lessons Learned

The lessons learned from this workshop are that the unique social and cultural characteristics need to be considered in performing project management in Japan. One of the important ideas is the Japanese concept of "WA". The concept of "WA" is complex. WA means sum, harmony, peace and Japanese Style. For example it is Japanese style to have lifetime employment. It is Japanese Style to work over time. It is Japanese style to maintain the schedule. It is Japanese style to have very high quality standards. It is Japanese style to balance the three important aspects of Project Management; Schedule, Quality and Cost as a group. It is Japanese style to reach consensus by a slow decision making process in which feedback and change is carefully considered. But "WA" also means Harmony. The society, organization and the team maintain harmony by balancing these aspects.

The Japanese Project Managers view Scope as a part of Quality. The view is that the scope is managed by the customer and it is the challenge of the Project Manager to balance the Quality, Cost and Schedule, There is a closer relationship with the Customer in the Project Managers Team. The Customer and the Sponsor have a greater role to play, while at the same time the power of the Project Manager is diminished. Since the introduction of PMBOK is somewhat new, the Japanese Project Managers do not control the Scope in the same way. There is more Joint team agreement between the Customer and the Project Manager. The separation and the distance of PMBOK Stakeholders in particular the customer is strange for the Japanese Project Managers.

To bridge the gap between Japanese Project Management and the global standard of the PMBOK, Project Managers are encouraged to spend more time in the initial planning stages. Team building activities that encourage the discovery of the disparity are encouraged. For example shadowing, pair work, smart travel, visiting cultural sites, learning about Japanese and other team member’s cultures. The teams ideally would than create a kind of Rule Book that would describe Best Practices for that team. The Rule Book utilizes the global standard of PMBOK and high lights the differences inherent in Japanese Project Management. Communicating "with a heart" as a "bridge" between team members is a common theme among all of the Japanese Project Managers. Understanding the implications of Personal Risk and Lifetime employment for Japanese Project Managers, overseas team members can understand the importance of planning, consensus decision making, meeting the High Quality standards, Maintaining Strict Schedules and balancing cost.

Closing

PMBOK Cafe would like to thank the Secretariat General of PMI-Japan Mrs. Hiroko Nagaya and the Project Coordinator Mrs. Fumiko Sato. Special Thanks for the facilitators for this Workshop were Mr. Rajeev Supekar PMP and Mr. Kenji Haga PMP

Team Building;

Communication;

Execution;

Risk Management;