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.