BUSI 681 Week 7 Group DB Forum 4 Part 1 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 4: Part 1 (Thread)

BUSI 681 Advanced Project Management II, Group Discussion Board Forum 4: Part 1 (thread)

Thread by [Student Name]

The forum prompt, the water utility and its consulting team in India are composites standing in for the course's own; the textbook, Scripture and research cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 681.

Thread

My utility hired an engineering consultancy to rebuild the hydraulic model of our distribution system, the computer model we use to size pipes and plan fire flow. The modeling team works from Hyderabad, India, where the working day is ending as ours begins. Every Tuesday at 8 a.m. our time, early evening theirs, we hold a one-hour call. The calls go well: questions are answered, and the Hyderabad team agrees with every request. Yet three of the last five deliverables have come back with the same problem, demand allocations that ignore the large industrial users we described on the calls. Each time, the team had said it understood.

Gray and Larson (2018) warn that international projects are shaped by environmental and cultural factors that managers from one country tend to underestimate, and that project managers must learn how their partners communicate before assuming agreement means understanding. Our calls are a textbook case. A junior engineer in a client meeting may hesitate to tell a senior client that a requirement is unclear, and I had read every "yes" as "understood."

Culture is only part of the explanation, though. Hinds and Mortensen (2005) compared 22 collocated and 21 distributed teams in one multinational company and found that the distributed teams reported more task and interpersonal conflict; a shared identity and shared context softened the effect of distance, and spontaneous, informal communication mattered most of all. Our project has neither. The Hyderabad engineers see themselves as the consultant's team, not ours, and our only contact is a scheduled hour each week. A single hour a week leaves no room for the hallway question that would have caught the industrial users in the first week.

Cramton (2001) adds a second mechanism. Studying thirteen geographically dispersed teams, she identified a mutual knowledge problem: members failed to pass on and retain contextual information, misread how important a piece of information was and struggled to interpret silence. Our industrial users live in a spreadsheet that our operations staff consider common knowledge. We mentioned it; we never sent it.

None of this means the offshore arrangement is a mistake. Stahl et al. (2010) combined 108 studies of 10,632 teams and found that cultural diversity tended to bring process losses through conflict and weaker integration, but gains through creativity and satisfaction, with effects depending on team tenure, size and how dispersed the team was. The Hyderabad engineers have already suggested a calibration approach our staff had not considered. The task is to keep the gains while reducing the losses.

Paul wrote that although he was free, he made himself a servant to all, meeting Jew and Gentile each on their own ground in order to win as many as possible (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Corinthians 9:19-22). He adapted his manner without changing his message. A project manager on an international team owes the same humility: adapt how the requirement is communicated without lowering the requirement.

I am proposing three changes. First, every call will end with the Hyderabad lead summarizing in writing what will be delivered and what is still unclear, which makes it safe to name gaps. Second, we will send the source data, not descriptions of it. Third, one of our engineers will join a 15-minute informal check-in twice a week at an hour that is reasonable for both sites, so questions can surface before they become rework. How have others in our group handled agreement that turned out not to be understanding?

References

Cramton, C. D. (2001). The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization Science, 12(3), 346-371. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.3.346.10098

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Gray, C. F., & Larson, E. W. (2018). Project management: The managerial process (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Hinds, P. J., & Mortensen, M. (2005). Understanding conflict in geographically distributed teams: The moderating effects of shared identity, shared context, and spontaneous communication. Organization Science, 16(3), 290-307. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0122

Stahl, G. K., Maznevski, M. L., Voigt, A., & Jonsen, K. (2010). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A meta-analysis of research on multicultural work groups. Journal of International Business Studies, 41(4), 690-709. https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2009.85