Profit Magazine - November 2007

Q& A
AVOIDING THE CULTURAL DANGER ZONES IN GLOBAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

International project management
consultant Bryan R. McConachy, Project
Management Professional and prin-
cipal of Bramcon Project Consultants
in Vancouver, Canada, talks about the
communication and cultural snafus that
can derail global projects.
PROFIT: How hard is it to build com-
munications with dispersed teams?
MCCONACHY: If it’s at all possible to
bring the group together at the start of
the project, that will jump-start the com-
munications process. Barring that, there
are a couple of things you can do to
help. The first is to build an inventory of
communications practices by surveying
each team member. By asking, “Do you
use e-mail?” you might be able to cir-
cumvent delays or misunderstandings.
Some people check e-mail constantly;

others, only a couple times a day. Some prefer the phone. Once you know how each team member prefers to communicate, you can build a list for the entire team. From that, build a communications protocol of how the team will communicate.

The other thing is a little trickier, and that’s to assess team members’ language capabilities. Some people can speak a second language competently but with an atrocious accent. On a conference call, that can really prove a barrier. If that’s the case, you need to find a diplomatic way to suggest that written communication might be more effective in this case.

PROFIT: How do you deal with cultural differences?

MCCONACHY: I hate generalizations,

but there really are differences that tend
to be visible across cultures, and you
have to get a handle on these things
in order to run the project effectively. I
try to do it by asking people questions.
Everybody is so different that I just ask
people in the most nonthreatening way
I can to find what they prefer, how they
react to cultural norms of other team
members, et cetera.
PROFIT: So it sounds as if doing
your homework up front will pay off in
improved communication throughout
the project?
MCCONACHY: Right. If you set up
rules at the front end that govern how
the team communicates, you have a
better chance of avoiding problems
caused by misunderstandings or mis-
communications.

they had a deadline with no wiggle room.

“Failure was not an option there, and it turned out to be a real shot in the arm for the project,” says Cognetta. “We had no choice—we could only go forward, and we were able to rally the team on an accelerated schedule.”

Brazil was where the PMO was put to the test, however. Although the business there was not large, the complex tax laws of Brazil required Iron Mountain to use a third-party tax software called Synchro to comply with Brazilian regulations.

“They didn’t have English skills at Synchro, and there was no English version of their documentation for Oracle On Demand to use,” says Oracle Consulting’s Padmanabhan. “There was a lot of manual translation, and complexity in getting the entire virtual team communicating on time.”

NEXT PHASE

The team has formally finished the three phase-one countries and is now well into the financials implementation for the U.K. “The U.K. project passed its third tollgate, and the project dashboard is pre-

dominantly green—all systems go for a November turn-on—and trending green in the five dimensions we use to measure this project,” says Padmanabhan.

And as the team applies lessons learned from each phase, the implementations should get much easier. “The toolkit is a big part of that,” says Cognetta. “Subsequent countries can use it to get a huge jump start on the project. It’s refined and bulletproof tested.” In fact, Iron Mountain is using the U.K. phase to assume more leadership and control of the project. “We needed help, and Oracle Consulting worked very well with our team,” says Cognetta. “But over time, we’ll take the training wheels off and do more of it on our own. The extent of their involvement should shrink over time.” In fact, Cognetta thinks the implementation rate will increase as the project team gets more countries under its belt. “We really should start accelerating, taking on groups of countries and running them in parallel along with a shared services strategy,” he says. Iron Mountain’s current plans include targeting eight

additional countries in Europe and Latin America next year for financials implementations, plus the first introduction of an HR system for the U.K.

Cognetta says that he is already seeing some uniformity of process in the first few countries and expects continued improvement. In the meantime, the PMO has moved into high gear. “This has been one for the books; it really has,” says Cognetta. “We’ve learned so much from the early phases about the right way and wrong way to do things.”