a303km project management assignment

A303KM –Project Management

A Study of the Alcatel-Lucent Atrium Wireless Call Server Project, the Problems Faced and Tools and Techniques Used

to Overcome the Problems

Student Name: Azrie Aris Bin Hamza Aris

Student Number: 09063007

Lecturer: Ms Sherin

Submission Date: 9/09/2010

A303KM – Project Management Azrie Aris Bin Hamza Aris 09063007

Table of Contents

Abstract 3

1 Part I – Technical and Management Problems 4

1.1 Technical Problems 41.2 Management Problems 6

2 Part II - Tools and Techniques Used 8

3 Recommendations 11

4 Conclusion 15

5 References 16

Auston Institute of Management of 16


Abstract

A large number of projects undertook by different companies fail because of complexities associated with multiple sites and time zones. Many were experiencing difficulties with projects from two different locations, so many of them just lose hope and had this thinking that projects that spanned multiple sites and time zones do not work. With different countries and different time zones, it would become more complex when cultural differences are added into the picture (Garg, 2008).

In this case study, what was discussed was how the Alcatel-Lucent Atrium Wireless Call Server (WCS) global team overcame the challenges when delivering the projects. The challenges that were identified were integration of the teams of different cultures and of different time zones, sites trying to make their decisions as well as cultural differences. Communication between the sites and the need to depend on other sites also increased. And due to the multiple time zones, the team was working more than they were supposed to as they were to attend calls after office hours. The growing teams from India and China teams all proved to be challenging too (Garg 2008).

This paper is to identify and explain in detail the technical and management problems that Alcatel-Lucent Atrium WCS Global Team faced and how they resolved the problems with the tools and techniques they used. Other than that, this paper also provided recommendations on how the project could be improved based on some tools and techniques previously not used by the WCS Global Team.



Part I - Technical and Management Problems

Let’s identify the different problems that the project faced and divide them into 2 types -technical and management.

Technical Problems

Different Time Zones

At first, the global team attended daily conference calls for their meetings with their counterparts from different countries. But by using these methods, the team members were working more than they were supposed to and this may have caused poor motivation. Together with the time differences, productivity dropped as they had to wait for another site’s team members to complete first before any issues could be resolved (Garg 2008).

Issues with Futuristic Team Setup

The WCS Team initially adopted the Futuristic Team Setup which was quite a new technique in project management. But, this was not working well. They quickly found out that the setup only worked well for some sites only. Due to that, some sites did not adapt well to it and this caused many problems (Garg 2008).

Project Monitoring and Control Issues

What was identified in the case study is that the team had e-mail communication problems, no common platform to discuss day-to-day project management issues and no proper Project Management Softwares used (Garg 2008).

From the start, the global team started with having weekly project status meetings through ad-hoc discussions and email. Through these methods, it was rather consuming as it was taking months before they could resolve an issue. The team also discovered that by using emails, the sites found it ineffective because there were too many correspondence needs to be done. And with the language background of different cultures and writing style, this made email communications less effective (Garg 2008).

Furthermore, project managers were not given an opportunity to deal with daily issues with project management. The only way for project managers to do so, would be a weekly status report call that is not targeted for the discussion of such issues (Garg 2008).



As you can see, such issues only occur when there is a failure in supporting the highly collaborative and interdependent nature of global project activities (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).



Management Problems

Cultural Issues

There were differences in culture (country and functional) that are not appropriately categorized, understood, and assimilated into the project. Alcatel being a multi-national company had indicated in the case study that they are experienced in working with global teams but this was not the case for this project. The management team knew that there will be cultural issues from the start but their unpreparedness was noticeable when they started to expand its pool of resources to include team members from other cultures. Along the way, managing the projects became more intricate and with this failure to manage this cultural difference constantly created problems. This could have been addressed properly (Garg, 2008).

Site Management Issues

It was discovered by the senior management that the grey area distinguishing project management and overall project managers from the site management and local project managers led to the multi site issues. Because of the different priorities that the management set, this led to some politics between the sites. It was easier to handle technical issue conflicts than management. At times; the project managers were also given directions that were conflicting from the site managers, the engineering managers, and the overall project manager (Garg 2008).

Local interests of sites sometimes surfaced where resources such as human and capital were not shared effectively. They were just keeping the resources idle and holding on to the resources with the thinking of utilizing it in the future (Garg 2008).

There are even some who had started their own sub or mini projects, and had implemented their own features without involving other sites. Thus, this resulted in duplications and inconsistencies. Inter-site issues, specifically with cultural differences, were something that needed the management to develop on (Garg 2008).

The management also found that there was a challenge in the integration of teams with different cultures and different time zones. When a new site was introduced, they also realized that there was a lot of communication going on between the sites. On top of that, existing sites did not support new sites and they were starting to blame each other due to this factor (Gar, 2008).

Another concern that the management discovered was that different sites went for long leaves or holidays for multiple weeks each year at different times. What they noticed



was about 20-25% of the time; one or more sites are on holidays or are not working during those periods. This resulted in putting the teams under a lot of stress, and the support level standards was dropping as all the sites did not have expertise in all the areas (Garg, 2008).

Human Resource Issues

Due to the nature of the projects which require manpower who have specialized skills and technical knowledge, this made it even more difficult for the management to look for the right team members for the projects .The team was growing in numbers when additional sites were added and this was particularly prevalent when the India team increased from twenty-five to one hundred and seventy five staff (Garg 2008).

Risk Management

The overall project manager was too dependent on the local project managers to manage their teams at their own sites while he oversees them from the US. He was not getting actual issues from them as they were not sharing them with him but instead they keep it to themselves and take matters in their own hands to resolve the issues. The overall project manager was also not informed of risks that were already causing an impact on the projects and he was also not given any insight into future risks that may happen. Normally, the project was already impacted by the risks thus, corrective actions could not be made by the time the overall project manager was informed (Garg, 2008).



Part II - Tools and Techniques Used

Techniques to address Issues with the initial Futuristic Team Setup

After the failure of the initial futuristic team setup, the global team found out that technical leadership should be spread across sites instead of focusing in the US. Thus a new strategy was needed and so they adopted a new one called The Area Owner Concept. What they did was to train senior members at other sites into area owners and assign one senior member from one of the sites to each area. Area owners were given the responsibility to provide technical guidance to area teams across sites and to conduct weekly meetings with the sites area teams. They were also given the task to assist to identify and resolve issues and prioritize defects. This setup helped area teams to have a more efficient use of resources and a more effective method to resolve issues (Garg 2008).

As a result of these changes, the technical teams were able to work more comfortably with area owners. They gave feedback that discussing technical issues with area owners was more effective and efficient since they had more technical expertise compared to the project managers (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address Different Time Zones

To address this issue, the team decided to build expertise locally at each site, which in turn reduces the need to depend on other sites. Productivity was also improved by leveraging time zones to quickly address critical issues as one team handed issues to another before going home, and would take over the next morning. They also ran into issues with daily conference calls. To address this issue they spread the burden of inconvenient times to all the sites (Garg 2008).

Tools used to address Project Monitoring and Control Issues

Initially, daily phone conferencing calls were done by the project team members, with specific focus for each call. In addition to the daily conference calls, they made use of collaboration tools such as instant messengers, NetMeeting and collaboration site to improve communication. But, they were running into issues with the daily conference calls which include quality issues such as dropped calls, noise and other interferences. There were zero hours of regular work-day overlap across all sites. Even how they schedule their calls, the timings for at least two sites was inconvenient. To address this issue, they spread the burden of inconvenient times to all the sites and just learned to cope with the quality issues (Garg 2008).



The main tool the teams were using initially was Microsoft Project, but they found it to be an ineffective tool for them. Thus, Microsoft Excel was used instead in all their project monitoring and project controlling. They used Dashboards built using the powerful programming languages of Microsoft Excel and created Spreadsheets to monitor defects, risks, issues and actions to be taken. Reports were also created for feature list tracking and status tracking (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address Cultural Issues

Cross culture communications training were carried out the team in the different countries. The management were monitoring for any types of problems which included those that may occur due to communication gaps. They knew cultural issues, if not addressed promptly, may put their project in difficulty (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address the Site Management Issues

To resolve these issues, a system to manage resources was developed to allow any site to allocate resources if they are not assigned. Team members were also able to access lab resources remotely (Garg 2008).

To resolve inter-site politics, sites are given the same responsibilities. Managers had to travel to other sites, and ensured that all sites were treated with respect. The management anticipated that the sites’ interests should be given full attention (Garg 2008).

There were better rapport among the teams and they were able to resolve issues effectively. Relationships between sites also improved and there is bad teamwork and sites are more involve in making Also, they are no longer finger-pointing among team members (Garg 2008).

As they built local expertise in all the areas, other teams supported activities of the unavailable sites with ease. Area owners also ensured that there was smoother taking over and handing over smooth (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address Human Resource Issues

What the management did was to start hiring a mix of experienced members and new graduates. While leveraging on the existing team members, who had experience in WCS, they trained the new team members so that they would be able to do the work more effectively and efficiently. They implemented the strategy of hiring a high number of new graduates who had no experience. This made the learning curve for the new



graduates was long which was taking a period of six months. But the good thing about this strategy was the team members were not reduced due to the low attrition rate (Garg 2008).

Techniques to minimize Risk

They divided big projects into many smaller projects. Each project had a definite start and stop that are made of smaller phases of the project. They implemented checkpoints and conducted constant management reviews before any transition was made to the next stage of the project (Garg 2008).

Area owners, with their strong grasp of areas and dependencies on other areas, will be able to assist to address and detect such risks (Garg 2008).



Recommendations

Despite the fact that the global team had successfully completed the project, from the lessons learnt from this project, they should actually further improve their project management processes for any future projects. The initial setbacks of the project could have been addressed earlier had they not followed some guidelines of good practices for global project management.

Based on the Global Project Management Framework by Jean Binder which was published on November 2007, let’s look at some of the factors which suggest good practices required for global projects and how this applies to the WCS project. This framework assists global project managers to focus on the advantages and address the challenges of having project team members located across the globe (Binder 2007). This is only used as a guideline for this paper and not the only solution available out there

Number of distant locations

Project teams for global projects are at least located at two different geographical locations which could be in another town, state or country. By using technologies such as phone conferencing and videoconferencing, this will ensure the application of communication strategies to ensure a high effectiveness level (Binder 2007).

Country cultures and different languages

Apart from having their own organizational culture, having people in the organization from different cultures, traditions and customs can bring more diversity to the work environment. This in turn could increase creativity and motivation as many people prefer to work in cross-cultural environments because of the rich information exchange. However, as in the the case in the WCS project, this diversity could also be the cause of conflicts and misunderstandings.

International companies like Alcatel-Lucent usually establish a common language for the exchange of information which is in this case was English. Depending on the country, the effectiveness of communication by most non-English staff will be limited by their knowledge of English expressions, and vocabulary. Project leaders with better grasp of the English language must limit their vocabulary and to use only clear sentences and essential words. They must always check whether their foreign colleagues understand what they are talking or discussing about.



In addition to the cross-cultural communication trainings that were conducted, what the management could have included were customized culture immersion session for each country as well as team building sessions before the start of any project to build better understanding, rapport and improve teamwork among the staff. Let me stress again that this should be done before any project to avoid any setbacks (Binder 2007).

Time zones

Managing project teams with members in completely different time zones can be very difficult and it is near impossible to organize meetings in normal office hours. One method is to implement a “follow-the-sun” approach, reducing the duration of sequential tasks by a half or a third of the time. The procedures and communication rules between sites must be accurately defined among people in “complementary” time zones when there is low overlapping of working hours.

However delays of high importance may happen, as the communication can sometimes take more than a week to be completed, instead of a single day. Global teams can carry out standard communication rules and templates across locations to reduce the waiting time as well as to reduce communication problems (Binder 2007).

Collaborative Tools and Techniques

There are two different categories within this area. Firstly, there are the collaboration tools which are basically the different types of hardware and software to allow communication over distance (Binder 2007).

The second category is the effective use of collaborative techniques in order to achieve efficiency. For example, there should be common rules and tips for e-mail communications in place between the different sites of the projects.

Thus, firstly, the hardware infrastructure for the tools needs to be improved. The quality issues that the teams were facing with conference calls need to be removed by having better network infrastructures at their sites. Secondly, what could have been implemented was proper training on the use of conference calls. This training does not only cover the technical knowledge to use the tools but also for the conference calls, there must be common rules, tips and step-by-step guidelines on what need to address during the conference call meetings (Binder 2007).



Having a unified collaboration framework to minimize the impact of all barriers

With the factors in mind, let’s explore another case study of a company, Amdocs, a global provider of customer experience systems in Israel, which wanted to help its IT teams work more efficiently by implementing a tool from Microsoft and unified all collaboration tools. In our opinion, with a centralized place for all the collaboration tools a better success rate compared to the WCS project (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

Project management in this company was particularly challenging because teams worked in multiple locations and used different software development models. To improve workflow, Amdocs standardized its application life-cycle management processes with Microsoft Project Server 2010.

It is also integrating the solution with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Exchange Server 2007. System administrators were also benefitting from deployment since now deployment is more than 50 percent faster, and Amdocs was expecting to cut costs by streamlining project management. Employees have Web-based access from almost any location and work more easily with a familiar interface. Senior Management now has better project visibility, and the company can extend the centralized solution to include more users and applications (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

The team that handled application life-cycle management (ALM) was based in Israel, and the research and development and product delivery teams were located in India and the United States. Other than working in different time zones, the IT teams used different types of project management methodologies and tools (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

Amdocs wanted a solution that would connect its infrastructure and its project teams in multiple locations which was the similar case with the WCS. They provide a single view of all the other systems in one place, including information about a project’s development status, change configuration, and resources. They were looking for one solution that could handle almost everything (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

So with the help of a third-party vendor, Amdocs successfully completed a pilot project with Project Server 2010 and began deploying the solution in its production environment in December 2009 by a third-party vendor enterprise wide by April 2010 (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).



By using a Microsoft Solution, Amdocs was able to integrate Project Server 2010 with Exchange Server so that employees would be able to update tasks in the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 messaging and collaboration client. It is also implementing Microsoft Business Intelligence tools such as Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that allowed them to include dashboards for management reporting similar to the Excel Dashboards for the WCS Project (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

The project managers in Israel normally work with the Microsoft Project Professional 2010 client software. Whereas the team leaders in India and other locations can use Microsoft Project Web App to connect through the Internet and edit projects. In addition, Amdocs uses Windows Communication Foundation to configure Web services that work with multiple communication protocols and connect with more applications (Microsoft Case Studies 2010). Thus, this created a multi-collaboration platform for all the project teams, which could work in multiple locations



Conclusion

Most project teams find their previous practices ineffective in today’s global business model. This is due to the fact that it is not the work of just “one” leader that delivers business results, but of senior managers and project managers as a collective team that happens to be separated by distance, time and culture that drive global project teams to success. Many senior leaders, who started on a globalization strategy as in the case of the Alcatel-Lucent, fail to anticipate the number and severity of barriers such as those indicated earlier during project execution (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

Without removal of the barriers, global teams fail to perform their function and successfully address the challenges they face (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

Firstly, it is important to describe the responsibilities between senior managers and global project team leaders. Senior management of an organization is best positioned to address the global barriers. The global team leaders for the WCS project, the overall project manager and area owners are best positioned to address the global challenges or problems.

Secondly, global barriers should be addressed by senior management first before expectations are set to the global team leaders to make progress on resolving the global team challenges (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010). What this means is that the senior management should have addressed all these issues beforehand rather than taking a “wait and see” approach when the project implementation was on-going. With understanding that the management was trying to keep costs low, many initiatives or creative ideas brought forward by the project leaders from different sites might not have been approved by them and this might have resulted in many limitations.

Poor initial planning of organizational structures can limit collaborative team dynamics necessary in a global development model. As in the case of the WCS project, there should be thorough research and analysis of the Futuristic Team Setup before rolling out this idea. There are other models and frameworks for global projects out there.

Leveraging on technology is also important as it would be able to overcome the global barriers that companies may face when working on global projects, as in the case of the Amdocs Case Study. The management from Alcatel-Lucent should know by now that globalization is taking place and the world is getting flat. If the company is taking too slow to adapt to technological changes, they will lose out to its competitors who are moving faster than them in this area. For a company that specialized in providing audio video conferencing as well as unified communication solutions, there was no clear



indication that they were using their own solutions which was rather strange and disappointing. Why this is so is quite questionable.

Apart from technology, People also play an important part too and it is critical to have the right people to perform their functions well. That is why training them extensively is very important and moreover, they are employing new talent instead of experienced members.

Last but not least, global organizations need to have the right structures, people, processes, and technologies that foster a high degree of collaboration. With all this in mind, this will in turn save time, money, human resources and ensure higher project success (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

References

Garg, Ram 2008, Delivering Multiple Sites and Time Zones Project: A Case Study in the Telecom Industry, PM World Today – November 2008 (Vol X, Issue XI), viewed 28 August 2010, http://www.pmforum.org/library/cases/2008/PDFs/Garg-11-08.pdf.

Binder, Jean, 2007, Global Project Management Framework - The framework: 25 knowledge areas, viewed 2 September 2010, http://www.globalprojectmanagement.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=6&Itemid=40

Microsoft Case Studies 2010, Amdocs - Software Engineering Firm Improves Workflow, Streamlines Project Management, viewed 28 August 2010, http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000007230

Waddell, J, Rahschulte, T & Martinelli, R 2010, Leading Global Project Teams: Barriers & Challenges, Part One of a Six - Part Series, PM World Today (Vol XII, Issue VII), viewed 1 September 2010, http://www.pmforum.org/library/tips/2010/PDFs/july/Advisory-Waddell-Rahschulte-Martinelli.pdf


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