Projects Without Borders Elizabeth Harrin (October 5, 2006) Managing international projects requires much more than calculating that when it’s 9 a.m. in Paris, Texas, it’s 4 p.m. in Paris, France. Crosscultural teams and customers won’t necessarily work the same way as you. Here are some strategies for discovering the differences and dealing with them. As the world gets smaller, projects seem to expand to fill the available space, and now many of us are tackling the challenge of managing cross-cultural project teams and cross-cultural project customers. When your project team spans different countries, getting everyone together for a conference call is a new kind of administrative nightmare. But it’s not just the practicalities of working out time zone disparities and correcting the occasional bit of awkward grammar that make crossborder projects so challenging. National culture plays a big part in how we act and work. Get a group of people together from around the world and they can’t even agree on what noise a rooster makes, so how are they going to come to a conclusion on how to communicate project progress to the stakeholders? Or, to put it another way, the people you are working with won’t necessarily work in the same way as you, and the people you are working for won’t necessarily want the same things. One financial project manager I know was sent to Spain for a year to set up a new process improvement initiative in one of his company’s call centers. The Madridbased office was already handling work from four other countries and the objective was to implement the Six Sigma methodology for process improvement to increase efficiency. “We were trying to

implement something completely alien to the Spanish way of working, in a different language, and a different culture,” he said. As a Dane educated in the United States, he was already sensitive to the role played