Abstract
The increase in globalization and the growing cooperation among organizations around the globe has brought about the need for “global projects”: projects involving stakeholders in different countries, from diverse cultures, speaking different languages, and working in skewed time zones. This paper evaluates the existing literature for success factors that address the challenges created by this evolving paradigm. The analysis draws from literature on co-located projects, virtual teams, and virtual project management, and provides clarity around the defining characteristics of these different concepts. Finally, from an analysis of these success factors, the authors propose a Cartesian concept model—The Global Project Management Framework—further explained in the book, Global Project Management: Communication, Collaboration and Management Across Borders, which was recently recognized by PMI as “…the best project management literature of the year” and which received the PMI David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award.
Introduction
The main objective of this paper is to explain a literature analysis performed to define and create the structure of a Global Project Management Framework. This analysis was achieved by (a) defining the challenges and consequences of the emerging project management paradigm “Global Projects”; (b) assessing existing recommendations in the fields of co-located project management, virtual teams, and virtual project management; and (c) creating an original structure for a model of good practice for global project management.
Co-located, Virtual and Global Projects
The 50 fifty years have seen the development, expansion, and extensive use of project management techniques (such as PERT and CPM, both later improved and complemented by software tools) and the surge of project management associations, standards, and bodies of knowledge (Gardiner, 2005, pp. 12-16). Later, advances in networking and computing power made virtual teaming possible (Henry & Hartzler, 1998, p. 2). The rise of remote working and virtual teams allowed the evolution from co-located projects into “more complex entities which span geographical locations, multiple occurrences and different organizational affiliations” (Desouza, Jayaraman, & Evaristo, 2002, p. 1). These entities are called “virtual projects” and are commonly defined as “involving collaboration between project members at different geographical sites” (Adams & Adams, 1997, cited in Evaristo & Munkvold, 2002, p. 3). As suggested by Damien and Zowghi (2002, p. 1), this definition can be expanded to consider not only the project members but all stakeholders defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI®) as “persons or organizations,…who are actively involved in the project or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or completion of the project” (PMI, 2008, p. 23). Considering projects as temporary endeavours that aim to terminate once their objectives are attained and the deliverables are completed (idem, p. 5), the relationship among different stakeholders in virtual teams is usually of short duration; this is in contrast to co-located projects, where “a significant number of people share experiences, myths, and legends” (Fernández, 2004, p. 41).
The implementation and usage of collaborative software is one the factors that motivated the appearance of virtual teams and projects (Chen, Romano, Nunamaker, & Briggs, 2002, pp. 3-4; PMI, 2008, p. 228), providing a “distributed project infrastructure that helps people communicate, collaborate and manage shared tasks in an integrated way” (Benett, 2002). At the same time, project management methodologies
In contrast to virtual projects, the term “global projects” was first coined by Zeitoun to specify a subset of virtual projects that involves people and locations in more than one nation, dealing with a variety of cultural differences, backgrounds, political systems, languages, and time zones (adapted from Zeitoun, 1998, p. 2). Rad and Levin (2003, p. 12) adopted a similar definition and identified the challenges faced by global teams as language barriers, time differences, religious, and cultural aspects. Once again, collaborative software can also be used to improve the communication layer; however, these specific challenges may require further changes in the structures of global companies and in the project management practices. Exhibit 1 uses an Euler diagram to illustrate the relationship between co-located, virtual, and global projects. The next section will identify the variables that differentiate co-located, virtual, and global projects.
Exhibit 1: Global projects as a subset of virtual projects
What Makes Global Projects Unique?
After an extensive study on global projects, Van Fenema (2002, pp. 525-532) identified the main differences between sites involved in a global project as “geographical distance and governance differences; time zone differences; diversity [differences in culture, operations, function, and language]; and differences of infrastructure.” Similar dimensions were identified by Fisher and Fisher for virtual teams: time, space, and culture (2001, p. 46).
By combining these differences with Zeitoun’s (1998) definition of global projects, it is possible to identify the main features that distinguish global projects from co-located projects and other types of virtual project. This is the first key output from this research and defines five characteristics that determine which project management challenges and recommendations are specific to global projects as shown in Exhibit 2.
Exhibit 2: Characteristics of global projects
These are now described in detail.
Global Projects Involve Locations in More Than One Country
With the rise of joint venture partners, offshoring, and outsourcing (Haywood, 1998, p. 2), projects increasingly involve people and offices in different countries. An ongoing survey (being conducted by the authors, involving people from different countries and sectors) suggests that an average of 76% of projects involve people in different countries. This growing trend is the very essence of global projects. It is the fundamental trait defining them and bringing the other variables to the fore, since these projects have their complexity increased by the greater geographical distances between stakeholders and consequently reduced opportunities for face-to-face contact. A direct impact of having people in different countries is the higher probability of having different languages (or dialects) and time zones. These are important sources of misunderstandings in relation to the prime project objectives (Fernández, 2004, p. 41).
An example from the authors’ experience is a project providing an infrastructure upgrade to systems located in one European country, which had its risk and communications management plans completely reviewed when the sponsor requested a scope increase to include stakeholders from Australia in key project activities and meetings.
Furthermore, project managers must consider different political and legal systems when performing procurement, cost, and quality activities. Country-specific rules can also affect schedule development, such as labor agreements for working overtime and during weekends, with influences on project time and costs. Stakeholder analysis and actual project management may also be more difficult in those projects where different government and non-governmental entities in different countries are involved.
Global Projects Involve Stakeholders Speaking Different Native Languages
Analogous to cultural diversity, the number of different languages spoken by people involved in global projects is likely to be an important factor (Pauleen & Rajasingham, 2004, p. 266). Most projects will choose an official language for most of the project documentation and meetings (Rad & Levin, 2003, p. 45). Some of the project deliverables, however, may need to be translated into different languages. More important is the fact that different groups of people will prefer to communicate in their own language during meetings, affecting people from other language groups and cultures. Another peculiarity to consider is the understanding of dialects, regional accents, local terms, and concepts by people coming from different languages (Rad & Levin, 2003, p. 45). Therefore, the existence of different native languages becomes one important factor restricting effective communication (Fernández, 2004, p. 46).
One example, very common in European projects, is the understanding of the word “eventually,” which implies that one event will certainly happen “at an unspecified future time,” but people speaking Latin languages can interpret this as “possibly,” by approximation from similar words used in their mother tongues (e.g., French “eventuellement,” Portuguese “eventualmente”). Extra effort is therefore required to ensure a full understanding of project actions by all stakeholders.
Global Projects Involve Stakeholders in Different Time Zones
Virtual projects often involve people in different time zones with skewed working hours. As one example, a project involving people from different states in Brazil or in the U.S. may need to deal with having four to five hours of “shared office hours,” when synchronous communication is possible and when problem-solving activities will have an immediate impact for all parties.
Global projects may involve countries where the time difference is more than eight hours, which is the case of Europe and Australia, eliminating the number of “shared office hours” and forcing people to work over their normal time schedule, very often motivating the creation of home offices to allow meetings and synchronous communication to happen. As expressed by Lipnack and Stamps (1997, p. 42) “at greater distance across the time zones, day turns into night and impedes people’s ability to interact simultaneously—even with media that travel at the speed of light.”
Global Projects Involve Stakeholders From Different Cultures
As identified by Pauleen and Rajasingham (2004, p. 266), the crossing of cultural boundaries can also happen on certain local and virtual teams, but it is more likely to happen in global project teams. Hofstede (1991, p. 21) defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from another,” and performed an extensive study that showed the differences in culture from 40 nations. His study determined profound consequences in the working methods of “international and multinational organizations who are confronted daily with the problems of collaboration of members of their staff carrying different culturally influenced mental programs” (Idem, p. 12). The understanding of different cultures can have an impact on risk management, communications management, and human resource management activities. Other challenges of projects involving people from different cultures are the “identity issues of autostereotyping (how groups perceive themselves) and heterostereotyping (how groups perceive other groups)” (Fernández, 2004, p. 41).
For example, from the authors’ experience, a software implementation project involving 20 European countries sharing the same system design and architecture, where a centralized co-located multicultural team is involved in all project steps, providing a translation between the local requirements and the centralized decisions, and communicating them further to the distributed teams in the countries.
Global Projects Involve Stakeholders in Different Organizations
All projects can have stakeholders from a single department in one company, from multiple departments, or from multiple companies. One could argue that some global projects may involve only stakeholders from the same organization; however, this research aims to study only projects that involve more than one organization. This is explained by the fact that most projects today involve some form of outsourcing, offshoring, alliances, partnership, mergers, or acquisitions.
Team members from different organizations bring to the project their own processes, standards, procedures, and corporate objectives. The project managers must adapt their management and leadership skills to the multiple policies, procedures, and organizational cultures.
A Framework to Evaluate the Global Project Management Success Factors
The literary sources on virtual projects (Dubé & Paré, 2004; Goncalves, 2005; McMahon, 2001; Rad & Levin, 2003) cover a significant amount of knowledge but do not address some of the challenges and recommendations for global projects, such as:
Organizations may need to adapt their cultures, procedures and technological environment when moving from co-located to virtual and global project management (Pauleen & Rajasingham, 2004, p. 274).
Global project managers and team members must change the way they communicate and interact with each other (Staples, Wong, & Cameron, 2004, pp. 170, 175; Pauleen & Rajasingham, 2004, p. 275).
These revelations about global projects support the view that organizational change principles can be used to obtain participation in the change process and an acceptance of the new working dynamics from all stakeholders. Thus, we suggest an approach that uses the basic organizational change variables to analyze the literature and form a basic model for evaluating best practices: people, tasks, structure, and technology (Clark, 1972, pp. 26-30).
Therefore, the second major finding and key novel output of this research is to classify the success factors required for global projects in the context of discrete knowledge areas derived from relevant organizational change domains, as shown in Exhibit 3.
Exhibit 3: The organizational change domains required for effective global project management
These five knowledge areas are described below and are interdependent:
Global teams: the knowledge on people management can cover the stakeholder management challenges and recommendations for global projects.
Global communication: the project management tasks that suffer more from the dispersion of stakeholders are those associated with communication (meetings and one-to-one discussions).
Global organizations: the knowledge area that will contain all recommendations on organizational structure for successful global projects
The vast amount of knowledge in the technology area, available in the literature, can be grouped into two different categories (Mullins, 1996, p. 87). At first, there are many recommendations for the evaluation and deployment of hardware and software to facilitate communication over distance, covering the central implementation of the collaborative tools within the company and their installation and setup by project managers and team members. One example is the “identification of basic criteria for evaluating products and services for virtual teams or globally dispersed projects” (Goncalves, 2005, pp. 185-198). The second category of knowledge is the effective use of collaborative techniques, with practical recommendations to be followed when employing the tools, such as the establishment of common rules and tips for e-mail (McMahon, 2001, p. 139; Fisher & Fisher, 2001, pp. 171-179).
The degree of interdependency of these areas suggests that a more effective implementation would be expected by following a holistic approach to global project management.
Recommendations to Global Project Managers
In the same way that Rad and Levin (2003, pp. 12-14) suggested that part of the procedures required for virtual teams can be shared from co-located team practices, the existing recommendations on virtual and co-located project management can provide a basis to develop suggestions for global project management. For example, these authors show how some procedures (such as requirements, scope, estimate, schedule, and documents) can be taken from co-located team practices and applied to virtual teams, whereas other sets of procedures must be modified (such as conflict management, feedback models, orientation, team building, and diversity), and others still require new procedures to be created (such as language, etiquette, software, and time zones).
It follows that part of the existing recommendations and practices for virtual teams can serve as a reference for global projects. However, they should not be employed directly, because of the differences between team management and project management. As identified by the Office of Government Commerce (2002b, p. 2), “projects appear to suffer from people problems just as day-to-day work can. Projects, however, have characteristics that make problems more acute.”
Following this rationale, a number of literature sources were selected and evaluated to identify the existing categories of recommendations for co-located and virtual projects and to analyze their appropriateness to global projects. The principle criterion used to select these sources was the comprehensiveness of their studies (with recommendations following a broad area). The suggestions available on these references were evaluated according to the five global project management characteristics (see Exhibit 2) and will now be classified using the framework previously established (shown in Exhibit 3).
At this stage academic papers that provide impact analysis of specific tools on team performance were not considered; these studies will be evaluated at a later stage of the research when verifying the model structure and elaborating recommendations.
Global Teams
People management was identified by the OGC as “the most difficult aspect of the PRINCE2 method to implement successfully” and the area “most likely to generate problems for a project” (2002b, p. 1). The use of a wide range of knowledge and interpersonal skills—including leadership, team building, motivation, communication, influencing, decision making, political and cultural awareness, and negotiation—is required for effective project management (PMI, 2008, pp. 409-413). By combining these elements with other recommendations from the literature on virtual teams, the following sub-categories were obtained:
Cross-cultural communication (Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2003, pp. 37-41; Connaughton & Daly, 2004, pp. 127-131; Fisher & Fisher, 2001, pp. 51-52)
Global team leadership and motivation (Connaughton & Daly, 2004, p. 119; Staples, Wong, & Cameron, 2004, pp. 160-161; Edwards & Wilson, 2004, p. 82; Neece, 2004, pp. 288, 303; Rad & Levin, 2003, pp. 76-84; Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2003, pp. 35-36)
Trust building (Fernández, 2004, pp. 55-61; Goncalves, 2005, pp. 148-155; Connaughton & Daly, 2004, p. 125)
Conflict resolution (McMahon, 2001, p. 58; Rad & Levin, 2003, p. 74; Fernández, 2004, pp. 55-61)
Coaching over distance (Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2003, p35; Haywood, 1998, pp. 97-99; Fisher & Fisher, 2001, pp. 59-72).
Global Communication
The PMBOK® Guide defines the “Project Communications Management” knowledge area, recommending the following processes to “ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, distribution, storage, retrieval, and ultimate disposition of project information”: “Identify Stakeholders,” “Plan Communications,” “Distribute Information,” “Manage Stakeholder Expectations,” and “Report Performance” (PMI, 2008, pp. 243-272). The PMBOK® Guide recognizes the impact of cultural and organizational backgrounds (p. 243) and the importance to define if most communication will take place in face-to-face meetings or virtual environments (Idem, p. 254). The vast knowledge on cross-cultural and remote communication complements the information on the inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs of the communication processes in the PMBOK® Guide, as follows:
Stakeholder analysis and communication channels—main activities of the Communications Requirements Analysis, technique of the Communications Planning process (McMahon, 2001, pp. 135, 179, 202-203)
Rules and templates—guidelines and templates are part of the Communications Management Plan (PMI, 2008, p. 257; Staples, Wong, & Cameron, 2004, pp. 169, 176; Rad & Levin, 2003, p. 54; Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2003, pp. 42-48, McMahon, 2001, pp. 17-18, 267-268)
Global communication strategy—component of the Communications Management Plan, created by the Plan Communications process (PMI, 2008, p. 257; Haywood, 1998, pp. 30-36, 52; McMahon, 2001, pp. 135, 179)
Global communication techniques—consisting of all techniques not directly related to technology, thus not discussed under the two first categories (PMI, 2008, p. 258-271; Rad & Levin, 2003, pp. 46-48; Fisher & Fisher, 2001, pp. 119-122; Goncalves, 2005, pp. 249, 260-265)
Global creativity—brainstorming is described outside the communication processes but identified by PMI (2008, p. 420) as a “general data gathering and creativity technique.” Electronic brainstorming tools can increase the creativity, mainly in global projects that involve different languages (Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2003, p. 66)
Global Organizations
In terms of global project organizations, most authors have tended to summarize the main actions that companies can take to improve the efficiency of their global projects into the following groups:
Global project structures—types of structures that can be deployed, according to the location of project team members and stakeholders (McMahon, 2001, p. 169; Haywood, pp. 107-114; Goncalves, 2005, pp. 135-139)
Selection of international human resources—techniques for the project team formation (McMahon, 2001, pp. 170-175; Haywood, 1998, pp. 61-69; Staples, Wong, & Cameron, 2004, p. 165; Goncalves, 2005, pp. 134-135)
Global project management offices—advantages that global PMOs can bring to global projects and international organizations (PMI, 2008, p. 11; Goncalves, 2005, pp. 311-344)
Organizational support and purpose—processes and practices that can foster collaboration across nations (Neece, 2004, pp. 284, 300)
Global collaborative networks—processes and guidelines that organizations can deploy for a successful project start, when the project team spans national and organizational borders (Pauleen & Rajasingham, 2004, pp. 271-275; McMahon, 2001, pp. 93-112; Rad & Levin, 2003, pp. 54-59)
Collaborative Tools
Many different criteria could be used to create sub-categories in this area, such as synchronous or asynchronous communication (Haywood, 1998, p. 26), push/pull (Mayer, 1998, p. 66), oral, written, printed, or electronic (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997, p. 90), types of communication channels (for example, one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many (Idem)), voice, video, computer, or face-to-face (Idem), information richness (Edwards & Wilson, 2004, p. 37), or technical infrastructure topology (for example, peer-to-peer, client-server, or web-based applications, as suggested by Goncalves, 2005, pp. 112, 337). The PMBOK® Guide defines the information distribution methods as “e-mail, fax, voice mail, telephone, video and web conferencing, websites and web publishing…web interfaces to scheduling and project management software” (PMI, 2008, p. 260). Most other sources use very similar structures with different detail levels (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997, pp. 90, 100; Goncalves, 2005, p. 185; Connaughton & Daly, 2004, pp. 131-135, 143; Staples, Wong, & Cameron, 2004, pp. 186-201; Neece, 2004, p. 306; McMahon, 2001, pp. 125-139, Haywood, 1998, pp. 36-53; Fisher & Fisher, 2001, pp. 131-193; Edwards and Wilson, 2004, pp. 89-91; Majchrzak and Malhotra, 2003, pp. 60-78). Therefore, these are the sub-categories to be adopted in the two technology sections to classify the information obtained from the literature:
Basic tools—e-mail, fax, voice mail and telephones
Audio and video tools—audio and video-conferencing
Text and image tools—instant messaging and web conferencing
Knowledge sharing tools
Project management software
The order presented follows the extent of the usage of these tools in the market (Maier, 2002, p. 20; Bajwa, Lewis, & Pervan, 2002, p. 7); this reflects the fact that the implementation of these procedures in global companies could start by the tools that most employees are familiar with before implementing new technologies that require more implementation, training, and learning effort. As one example, Goncalves provided a detailed definition of these technologies, with some examples of software solutions and technical specifications for virtual projects (2005, pp. 176-185).
Collaborative Techniques
Considering that every technology deployed in the company should also have a set of success factors for their efficient use, similar sub-categories to the previous knowledge area will be employed with a focus on the description of techniques that can be used to deploy the tools.
The outcome of this analysis is a matrix combining the 5 elements of the framework each having five sub-categories as depicted in the holistic Cartesian framework shown in Exhibit 4.
Exhibit 4: Global project management framework
Conclusion
This study has identified the main characteristics of global projects through evaluating different sources of information on co-located and virtual project management, as well as virtual teams. Its main outcome has been a novel framework (see Exhibit 4) for global project management, defining this domain’s characteristics, formalizing a structure, and outlining the categories and sub-categories of success factors. This model is explained in more details in the book, Global Project Management: Communication, Collaboration and Management Across Borders, and must now be rigorously tested and improved, via further theoretical and empirical studies, to be applicable to companies and projects in different countries and project domains.
Global companies can decide which segments of the Cartesian framework are applicable according to their strategies and implement these parts of the model to measure and improve their efficiency on global projects. The organizational policies, standards, and culture can be improved according to the recommendations, and this model can serve as an index of companies’ good practice, to be developed based on technological choice, company cultures and the different cultures of people participating in the process. This novel model can