In traditional project management, the project leader updates the plan in a meeting or through contact with team members. This has several drawbacks in international projects. First, it is almost impossible to reach everyone. You would be on the telephone all of the time. You could do no other work. Second, it lowers the project leader to the position of a clerk—demeaning. Third, the team does not participate.

You require a better and faster method in which team members collaborate and participate. Here are the steps of a winning method:

This is a proactive approach that gets the team members to participate and define and update their work. The project leader is then really functioning as the project leader and not doing clerical work. Look at the third step again. Notice that team members cannot just slip a task and input a new duration. If you allow people to do this, you will lose traceability in the plan. Accountability will also suffer. Another benefit of the method is that it saves time since updating is being performed in parallel. In addition, the project leaders’ time is focused on where there are problems.