Challenges For Project Managers In Global Project Management

There are many challenges that the project managers have to encounter. Throughout the project implementation, the project manager’s aim is to meet the objectives of the project, to define the project tools, methodologies and schedule the deadlines. The project managers supervise the daily activities, observe the project progress and deal with the challenges.

Managing the projects is a challenge for the project managers and it becomes difficult to meet the objectives of the project, once the project changes from local to global.

Some of the challenges the project managers face while managing a global project are:

• Geographical boundaries: In a local project, there are several meetings held on a regular basis to get the status updates by the project team and to ensure that everything is on the track. But, this is not easy with a global project and managing the project team across the great geographical distances is the biggest challenge because physical interaction with the project team members daily with the people located in different time zones, tracking the progress and providing the timely feedback is far too difficult. The effective project management, tracking progress and project team communication can be done by interacting online by office management tools.
• Cultural differences: In a global context the management of the project is a challenge for the project managers because of the cultural diversities. Cultural differences affect the communication between the project team and the project managers. Most of the times the different cultures and attitudes of the team members creates problems in the business environment, while dealing with business partners and the people in the organization. The cultural diversity has an impact on the project’s performance due to the failure for adapting behaviors in achieving the project team goals and objectives. The globalization of project gives rise to the need for developing the effective management of the project teams and the processes for understanding of the cultural elements.
• Using wrong applications: The project team members may be managing the project data with software applications like – Microsoft Office, which are updated very frequently. The other team members located globally may not be well equipped with the updated software applications. It becomes a challenge for the project managers to manage the projects and interact successfully with the lack of updates about the resources. Online project management software should be installed where updates on the status of the project, feedback about the project’s progress can be received immediately; tasks and documents can be managed in a smarter way.
• Technical capacity: The technical capacity includes competencies, skills and the knowledge. The technical capacity disparity is another challenge that project managers have to face in managing global projects. The offshore project team may not be as good in abilities and expertise, as the local engineering contingent; which will have an impact on the efficiency of the entire project team.

There are many other challenges that project managers come across while managing the global projects. If he is successful to eliminate them, the project team can turn up successful.

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About Anu Kaushal

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