International Project Management: Leadership in Complex Environments

Introduction

Communications must be effective in even small projects. It becomes critical in international projects. The uniqueness of international projects creates special problems.

• If communications is not achieved, then there may be a delay of a day or more before you can try again.

• Different countries have widely different holidays and varying work schedules. This adds to the communications burden.

• Many people think that they can just communicate through e-mail or telephone or fax at any time. This places an undue burden on the people at the other end who must remain at work for hours or get up in the middle of the night to communicate with you. No wonder this approach builds resentment.

In many international projects, people start out without a plan or an approach. The haphazard, ad hoc approach seems to work until an important issue or problem arises. Then there is a crisis and people are kept up for hours—not good for either resolving problems or being useful.

The golden word in international communications is planning. You have to plan ahead. The second rule is that there must be minimum overhead in preparing reports and presentations. This supports the use of templates for reporting and presentations. What is a template here? It is a high-level outline of a report or presentation. These outlines can then be improved and reused over time. By using the same general outline for a category of presentation or report, the audience is not concerned about the structure; they have seen it before many times. They can then focus on the content of the material.

Let’s summarize what has been discussed so far:

• The major project management documents and reporting, including the plan, project status, and issues employ templates.

• All presentations and plans should be stored on the network so that people can read them over and learn. They can also steal ideas from them for their own work. Nothing wrong with this—it is to save time and to improve the end product.

• The outlines are improved and refined over time as are the templates for the project plans.