Split Up the Overall International Business Project (part 2): How to Break Up? | Global Business, Global Management

As was stated in the part 1, this is one place that many projects go wrong. Here are four actions to take:

Action 1 : Identify and review the major areas of risk.
Action 2 : Create a separate subproject for each area that has risk. This puts the focus on risk.
Action 3 : Review the business and political purpose of the project.
Action 4 : For the part of projects that remain after Action 2, organize these so as to achieve the business and political purposes.

Remember the following: Many projects can be technical successes, but turn out to be business and/or political failures. They then fail overall. Hence, the emphasis on the business and political goals. Next, by organizing the project around the dual themes of minimizing risk and political/business objectives you work to achieve both. You orient the team and management toward these goals as well.

The areas of risk depend upon the type of international projects that you’re undertaking. However, the business and political goals are often more common and include:

• There is a need to build relationships among staff and management at different locations so that there will be increased communications and collaboration after the project is concluded. Organizing the project across locations provide support to achieve this goal.
• Instill a more standardized way of thinking across the organization. Look at recent failures in international finance and banking. Many of these problems were due to compartmentalization. People had become isolated in their jobs—making fraud and deception easier to carry out. Standardization and awareness are promoted by a cross-location project organization.

We’ll study the case example in part 3.