Challenges and Best Practices in International Projects

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, printed single-sided, grade: 1,3, University of applied sciences, Munich, course: MBA, language: English, abstract: In this assignment the authors will look into the subject of challenges and best practices in international projects. A single examination of all the various challenges in the world of global project management like multicultural communication, geographical distance or asynchronous interactions - resulting from multiple systems happening and taking place in more than one location and are requiring different technological knowledge for e.g. - is confronted to a broad presentation, examination and evaluation of best practices: namely concrete business orientated solutions like global teams, collaborative tools or global project organizations. The theoretical introductory part exposes lack of sensitivity to local cultures, the general issue of complexity which arises in lack of control, variety of regulations and rules, different time zones and also the treatment of the international project as a standard project as main challenges for and reasons for failure of many international projects. All these rather impeding and logically challenging findings are visibly summarized in the Five Dimensions of IP figure, concluding that there are five dimensions which will affect every project in a different manner and in different decrees of intensity. Next, there is the description and visualization of new, interesting international PM tools like the risk register, quality gates. Additionally the authors come up with general rules and advice as the agreement on binding communication rules, templates and one language for successfully working global project team. In the last part the uneven challenges and best practices couples are kind of married by presenting two successful international projects: The SWAP project from the leading central European energy supply company OMV, where the superior project manager Barbara Krappinger succeeded in overcoming many cultural and geographical challenges and a major event management project from the Siemens.