ProjectManagementOnTheFeet
A 2005 listing for an applications project manager posted by Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield sought the following: "Technical leader with strong technology, consulting, communication, and project management skills to supervise software development and implementation efforts in a distributed environment involving onshore and offshore development teams." The cross boundary spread of companies to morph themselves as transnational and multinational, evolved the IT project managers considerably
Managing projects under one roof is significantly different from managing people under multiple roofs in multiple geographies of the world. There are some obvious issues like time-zone, cultural and language issues, following are the some issues listed below that affect Project Management.
Well-Known Issues
- Language barriers – Often in a world where English is not the primary language
- Time zones- Operating out in various Time-zones with an “Indianized”1 schedule results in a heavy stess environments
- Distance – Distance kills the direct interaction
- Culture differences – Addressing by the First Name, .
- Communication styles – Open Communication, Explicit Communication
- Etiquette - Dressing Style and Body Language
Less Obvious Issues
- Assertiveness (Shying away from asking questions)
- Built-in hierarchies – Typically called “Babudom”2, the hierarchy adapted from the Government system
- Negotiation skills – All the work supervisor gives must be done rather than negotiating pragmatically, so typically offshore resources don’t question the amount of work to be delivered in a limited time period
- Attitude (e.g., attention to detail)- Reading in between lines and understanding the context by giving lot of attention to detail.
- Work processes – No matter which process certification a company has, most of employees tend to switch to just in time/ad-hoc process focusing on delivery.
- Work practices – Eleventh hour delivery practices and mere act of delivering rather than checking the quality of the deliverable.
- Bad management - Management by numbers and figures. It should be context sensitive and dynamic and pre-plannes.
- Respect for IP rights – Most of the offshore countries care a less about the IP rights as they have more complicated problems to address, and there by the employees of those countries tend to pay less attention to IP rights by nature.
