0.7 Project management areas of expertise  (Page 2/4)

Understanding the project environment

There are many factors that need to be understood within your project environment ( [link] ). At one level you need to understand your project environment by thinking in terms of the cultural and the social environment. In this region we think of people, demographics and education. The international and political environment is where you need to understand about different countries cultural influences. Then we move on to the physical environment; here we think about time zones, think about different countries and how differently your project will be executed whether it is just in your country or whether you have an international project team that is distributed throughout the world in five different countries.

Of all the factors the physical ones are the easiest to understand, and it is the cultural and international factors that are often misunderstood or ignored. How we deal with clients, customers, or project members from other countries can be critical to the success of the project. For example, the culture of the United States values accomplishments and individualism. Americans tend to be informal and call each other by first names, even if having just met. Europeans tend to be more formal, using surnames instead of first names in a business setting, even if they know each other well. In addition, their communication style is more formal than in the US, and while they tend to value individualism, they also value history, hierarchy, and loyalty. The Japanese, on the other hand, tend to communicate indirectly and consider themselves part of a group, not as individuals. The Japanese value hard work and success, as most of us do.

How a product is received can be very dependent on the international cultural differences. For example, in the nineties, when many large American and European telecommunications companies were cultivating new markets in Asia, their customer’s cultural differences often produced unexpected situations. Western companies planned their telephone systems to work the same way in Asia as they did in Europe and America. But the protocol of conversation was different. Call-waiting, a popular feature in the West, is considered impolite in some parts of Asia. This cultural blunder could have been avoided had the team captured the project environment requirements and involved the customer.

It is often the simplest things that can cause trouble since unsurprisingly in different countries people do things differently. One of the most notorious examples of this is also one of the most simple: date formats. What day and month is 2/8/2009? Of course it depends where you come from; in North America it is February 8 ^th while in Europe (and much of the rest of the world) it is 2 ^nd August. Clearly, when schedules and deadlines are being defined it is important that everyone is clear on the format used.

The diversity of practices and cultures and its impact on products in general and on software in particular, goes well beyond the date issue. You may be managing a project to create a new website for a company that sells products worldwide. There are language and presentation style issues to take into consideration; converting the site into different languages isn’t enough. It is obvious to ensure that the translation is correct, however, the presentation layer will have its own set of requirements for different cultures. The left side of a web site may be the first focus of attention for an American; the right side would be the initial focus for anyone from the Middle East, as both Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. White, which is a sign of purity in America (e.g., a bride’s wedding dress), and thus would be a favored background color in North America, signifies death in Japan (e.g., a burial shroud). [link] summarizes different meanings of common colors.