Cultural considerations in project planning

The impact of culture differences on a project team cannot be overstated. The sooner we recognize that people with different cultural background will

- express themselves differently
- make decisions differently
- view/deal with issues differently
- have (inhibited by) unique social norms.
- have different festive celebrations that would impact project schedule.

and build these considerations into our project planning, the better will be the collaboration be in a project team, and the greater the efficiency of the team.

Opening my account with the following...

Guys, I know I've been a little (read: *very*) slow in starting.. but here's my 1st contribution with what I've learnt about managing a virtual project team:

1. Strong Project Mgmt/Program Mgmt is vital.

2. Keep team engaged and updated. Communicate, communicate, communicate!!

• Every team member should know what they are supposed to deliver, and when.
• What's the progress
• What's next
• What's the status
• How to get it started again (if project is going south like ours is)

I just learnt of the term "mushroom management" i.e keep 'em in the dark, and give 'em *fertiliser* from time to time. Nobody should be left guessing.

3. Team Norms and Ground rules are important, in fact in a virtual team it's perhaps the only thing the PM/PgM has to fall back on. Commit to it and use it effectively to guide, persuade, goad (or even coerce) team in the desired direction. In our case, we have team agreement.

4. Meet up as often as possible, whether virtually or face to face.

There.. my 1st contribution out of the way. Now to go on to other deliverables.

My 2c's

Allowing myself to share some lessons learned here I would say this project is going down the drain before it even really started ....
No feedbacks, no initiatives, no anything - seems everybody is just waiting for a miracle to happen and Paul is just handing out the accreditation for free; well guess what - that's not gonna happen!

Official progress report for the last weeks: 0%

Klaus

Possible error...or my brain is atrophied!

Hi

Going throw an example about the fixed and variable costs (Engineering Economy page 25), the result x=17,121 cubic yd seems to be wrong. The result of the equation $53,160+$4.945=$8.05x should be 6,604 cubic yards.

Claudio

Your opinion about this blog

Dear Team,

Myself and Yoyok need to gather your first opinion about:
- is the blog easy to navigate?
- is the blog easy to read?
- is there any add-on you would propose to improve the communication?

Please feel free to post your comment to this thread.

Claudio

Our Blog and Group

Dear All,

If you want to view our blog and Group, please go directly to this link :

Blog : get-cce.blogspot.com
Group : groups.google.com/group/get-cce

Best regards,
Yoyok

Blog Stats

Dear Team,

I just added the statistics to this blog. This is an efficient way to find out how our blog works (number of unique visitors per day, page views, page popularity, visitors per country...)

I will publish the stats on weekly basis on the Google Groupe site.

Cheers, Claudio

1st Message

Hi team,

To get the Blog started I have the frist contribution:

link to WBS and PERT chart tools mentioned yesterday: www.criticaltools.com

The Project WBS will be distributed to all of you for further review and decomposition based on the mentioned tool.

Cheers, Klaus