The Cranes of Singapore

This past week I was waiting for a meeting to start high above downtown Singapore. I looked out the window and counted at least 15 cranes within a few blocks of the Suntec Tower One. Market crash? Downtown in global economy? Life goes on. Business goes on. Building goes on so far. The sun still rises each day, even if overspeculation and loose credit rules have conspired with the greedy to wipe trillions off global stock exchanges. Project managers still lead the resources for accomplishment of work in portfolios, programs and projects.

Singapore construction cranes. Cranes that tower over the skyline. Asian cranes. Beautiful birds in flight or standing still. Legends, in literature, sculpture and painting in Asia. In some Asian martial arts the crane is a mascot if you will. Great lessons are learned from observing both the beauty and actions of the birds. A crane's meaning to a particular martial art will mean BALANCE among other things as in the story below:

The Fāng family lived in Fujian, a province of China, in a place where there were manycranes. Qīniáng's father knew the Southern Chinese martial arts and taught them to his daughter. One day, while Qīniáng was doing her chores, a crane alighted nearby. Qīniáng tried to scare the bird off using a stick and the skills she learned from her father but whatever she did, the crane would counter. Qīniáng tried to hit the crane on the head, but the bird moved its head out of the way and blocked the stick with its wings. Qīniáng tried to hit the crane's wings, but the crane stepped to the side and this time blocked with the claws of its feet. Qīniáng tried to poke the crane's body, but the crane dodged backwards and struck the stick with its beak. From then on, Qīniáng carefully studied the movements of cranes and combined these movements with the martial arts she learned from her father, creating the White Crane style of Fujian Province.

Balance is essential in portfolio management on Wall Street as well as portfolio management of the projects you have under management now. Right now Project Managers are still managing portfolios of projects globally. Many are doing more with less. Less budget. Fewer people. Maybe aging IT infrastructure or telecom assets. Maybe postponing the start of new projects until risk can be lowered, and operating cash flows restored.

What is the solution? Who will be the hero and provide balance as Project Manager, if anyone?

I would refer you back to your original Project Charter, Project Plan and Master Schedule. I suggest that you ensure that your day-to-day tasking, whether it be design, development, or operations comply with those original "living" documents.

Balanced. Optimized. Aligned.

If not, you may want to perform a very quick assessment to find out how far off the critical path you have gone for your project. What will it take to get in back on track? What will that cost? Who will you need on the team to get it done? How long will it take?

Maybe you are not a hero. Maybe you are a crane. You have the balance, and the tactics to block bad moves aimed at your project and restore the project to its own balanced actions. A crane, rather than looking good standing still, is balanced and fierce in actions taken to reconfigure project performance. You are a crane!

Have a relaxing weekend. Let me know what you think as you have time...

Regards,

Rick

Building Cross-Cultural Project Teams for High Performance Results

In this global economy whether it is strong or weak, projects have a cross-cultural element that we must all work to strengthen. There are so many factors and I will go into just a few here that should be considered when building a global and thus cross-cultural team.

Team integration should be seamless to kick off the project and move forward in step with the project plan and master schedule. The Project Manager should consider each stakeholder, member of the Project Management Office, as well as endusers. A few of the integration categories are:

• Credentials - Nation to nation, school systems have different accreditation bodies to ensure the quality of graduates. The Project Manager must be able to align the value of a university or trade school and its degrees


• Skills - Skillsets vary depending on demand in a market, and a Project Manager on a global project must know how and where to resource the appropriate skillsets needed based on the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and the Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS).


• Experience - The level of experience should be evaluated along with credentials and skills to determine a best fit on the project team. Years of experience should be assessed along with depth of experience.


• Merit - Project Managers should recognize the meaning and value of merit in recruitment, promotion, and success on a project may vary nation to nation, culture to culture to culture. Merit is sometimes like comparing apples to oranges, but a skilled, politically attuned Project Manager should be able to know the differences globally.


• Productivity - Master Schedule Plans developed in the "home office" of a corporation's PMO rarely reflect the local differences whether it be as simple as time zones or public holidays. A global, cross cultural Project Manager should know that he/she will not be taking off the 4th of July as an American when working overseas. By the same token, the global Project Manager should learn as quickly as possible that local offices of the project will observe differing working hours (maybe 10 instead of 8 hours), working days (Sundays for instance).


• Innovation - This area is often overlooked on projects. A degree of repeatability has been garnered over time by experienced Project Managers. However, change happens quickly on projects these days, and not just with technology. Innovation could either drive a project via new ideas or new ways of working, or be a reaction to the shortfalls of people, process or tools being experienced on a project. The Project Manager will have to which type of innovator he or she will be. I prefer to drive rather than to react.


• Creativity - A Project Manager who is adept globally, will be creative in completing the project on-time and on-budget. Creativity could be something as simple as using cultural themes to decorate and identify the conference rooms in the "home office", or to actually bring in language tutors to train long term staff in a local language or even business English. The Japanese have been very good about teaching their managers posted to Thailand the Thai language.


• Trust - For a Project Manager, or anyone really, trust takes a long time to build, and a New York minute to destroy. Credible, ethical Project Managers are an example to the global project team. Your words and actions are watched constantly, interpreted, misinterpreted, and reinterpreted. Building trust begins before the project kicks off, and in many cases may take an entire project lifecycle to fully achieve.

I always give high priority to these integration aspects of managing cross-cultural project teams for high performance results.

I am always interested in your comments to my blog posts. If you agree or disagree, lets start a dialogue so we all can upgrade our skills.

Have a great weekend!

Regards,

Rick