Communicating Across the Globe by Jolito Ortizo Padilla

Outsourcing and working with international partners has become part of every business. International and virtual project teams are more prevalent and 24-hour business requirements can mean that teams are geographically split across continents.

There are five areas a project manager needs to pay special attention to in this situation:
- Cultural dynamics in the team
- Helping the team work as a team
- Coordination of work
- Practical communication issues
- Stakeholder management

A project's success is often dependent on support of the stakeholders and their perception of its success. Having the team spread across a large geographical area can allow stakeholders to go directly to the local member of the team. Using these contacts wisely can bring stakeholder value but poor communication about stakeholders' needs and wishes can be alternative and damaging as a result. The project manager needs to help his team feed information back so all stakeholder views and issues can be considered in project decisions.

Stakeholders approaching local team members directly can also cause workloads to become unbalanced or changes to be made to products or plans without proper consideration for the whole team. The team needs a culture of general helpfulness towards stakeholders with a strong ethos of not undertaking any work that is not assigned to them. The use of change requests, change controls and issue management becomes increasingly important in these situations.

If the project team is working in South America, India and London to cover stakeholders' needs, the project manager will need to have a work pattern to cover very long days without too many long hours.

Central control can be delegated and distributed around the team but managing the work and the required outcomes of each step of the project is a coordination role for the project manager A core team taking responsibility for parts of the project is a common solution. The project manager in these teams must be excellent at planning and delegating work to ensure progress.

Managers must avoid using stereotypes in planning the team's work and really consider who has the best skills to do each task. There are advantages in the diversity of the team and the best available resource possibilities; the best people may have different perspectives. However, gaining this understanding is normally something the project manager does in person, which is more difficult when the team is not co-located. If possible , the project manager should fly out to meet as amny of the team members as possible, see where they live, get to know them and work out some different cultural approaches. Getting the team together where the project manager is based is more expensive, but allows team members to begin to understand their leader's approach approach too. From the start communication becomes much easier.

Team motivation can be difficult to manage at a distance and very easy to disrupt through misunderstanding. It can be difficult to gauge the morale of the group, pick up on cultural differences -for example, an agreement in one place is a contract but in another a basis for discussion-or see if determination is comprised of what we say, 38% of how we say it and the other 55% of what we can say when in the same space, such as body language and eye contact. Emails, reports and telephone conversations cannot convey the whole of the message unless very carefully worded when sending. Double checking what different cultural drivers are in play and guessing what tone a sentence was written in takes extra time that needs to be scheduled into the project.

Internet video conferencing can be arranged with most desktops or laptops. It is also possible to record meetings for those who can't make it and this cuts out the effort of minute-taking. Seeing and hearing colleagues helps our understanding and progress but careful attention must still be paid to mannerism, manners and language, especially where local expressions or colloquialism may mean the reverse of the more generally acknowledged meaning.