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Home : International Project Management : The Score Card For The Project Leader
The Score Card For The Project LeaderThe Score Card For The Project LeaderThe use of score cards has always been a good idea for regular measurement. Later in the book you will see score cards for a project, for department participation, and for consultants and contractors. Figure 3.3 contains a score card for the project leader. You should evaluate yourself on a regular basis. Also, use this list as a starting point. As you review the list, you can see that some of the factors are subjective. This is by intent since project management is not a science; rather, it deals with the world of politics and personalities. How often should a project leader be measured? Certainly, not just at the end of the project. If you have a year-long project, then three measurements would be useful. This would give the opportunity to make some changes and improvements when the project is still going on. Managing Multiple ProjectsIf the discussion of project leadership were to stop here, this would traditionally be in line with other books. However, international projects really benefit from gathering lessons learned and from building project management capabilities over time. Cumulative effect and benefits are the keys to long-term success in international projects. Your goals for managing international projects extend beyond a specific project and include the following:
Some would argue that this experience is not really that relevant since each international project is unique. Take construction. Each building project is unique to the situation. The same is true with mergers and acquisitions. Yet, look at the real world. The details are different each time, but the general structure of types of projects is the same. Thus, if you were going to deploy a new purchasing process in four countries, each country could use the same project template, but the detailed plans would be different. Moreover, after you finished in one country with one project, you could learn from this effort to benefit you in the second. The same would be true for the third and fourth. This is true even if the efforts were undertaken in parallel. The same is true with issues and lessons learned. The same 400–500 issues have been found to recur again and again in projects. Lessons learned gathered about dealing with cultural or political issues tend to remain valid in different situations. The Project Office And The Role Of Project CoordinatorIf keeping experience is a good idea, then the problem becomes one of how best to gather, retain, and organize the information. One method is to employ a project office. A project office is a centralized group in an organization that is concerned with projects across the corporation—not just the international projects. However, project offices sometimes fail because they become too bureaucratic. They also fail because the people in the project office are only schedulers and have not managed a real world project. Is there another approach that can work better? Experience shows that the use of a project coordination role is very useful. To be effective the position of project coordinator should rotate among different organizations and people. In this way, it will have less of a chance of becoming bureaucratic. What is the role of project coordination?
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