September, 2007

Project Management, far away from home

Recently, I have been giving a job as a project manager of a small IT firm; the firm is located outside the United State, in Saudi Arabia. My main responsibility will be to prepare the firm to play a bigger role in the local and regional IT market. When I started my work, the firm had about three employees and part time manager, their main work consisted of:

1- Desktop and laptop repairs
2- Small computer parts shop
3- Wireless and wired network setup onsite work

Although the firm size may sound small, they have big ambitions to play a bigger role in the market. The regional IT market is very promising and there is a good opportunity for growth for everyone.

As a global project manager, my job took me to India and than to Saudi Arabia, in my traveling I always noticed two things:

1-from the IT point of view, the world seems to be one small place, all the troubleshooting methods, solutions, network infrastructure, security setup, etc, seem to be identical.

2- from the management point of view, things are a bit different, and each country has its own style of project management methods, although we are moving more and more toward standardized project management, we are still far away from one school of thoughts in project management.

As a consultant, I feel privileged to have an American education and work experience. If your work involves global project management or global management in general, your American management experience should come handy.

If your work takes you around the world than keep these things in mind:

Nothing happens on time or within budget: Managers in the US often complain about projects running out of schedule or over budget, well when you are working at global level, the problem may even get worse so always keep that clear in your project management plan.

Expect the unexpected: working with staff that has value system different than yours may create a lot of frustration and misunderstanding, so always be prepared to expect less than what you have planned for.

People in General are open for change: you will find people in your staff who are eager to move up and willing to learn, invest your time in them, they will be your best helpers.

Be very patient: in some countries bureaucracy is well rooted in the system and things move at slower rate than what you accustomed to.

Enjoy the ride: management is all about people skill, so if you find you self working thousands of miles away from home, size the opportunity and enjoy the ride.

Theses are small tips I thought would be helpful for new manager in global scene, they are not meant to be universal, your experience will differ from country to country and from company to company, try to be open for new cultures and new ideas, it will make your experience more enjoyable.

In my next post, I hope to go into more details about the day to day project management issues.