Building a Successful Program Team Across the Globe

The modern problems of large implementations surround the challenges of global team management and bridging inevitable gaps between business processes with the involvement of multiple vendor partners, program sponsors and stakeholders.  While many businesses desire the benefits of Agility most still have Waterfall for the ultimate decision making body: Finance Organization.  This in itself creates an ever-lasting tension between Waterfall and Agile, which forms the basis for many challenges the Team(s) must overcome.  Added to this foundational challenge are the various time zones, languages, cultures, personalities and even basic human idiosyncrasies.  Before the Project Manager or Scrum Master even completes his/her first day, the elements of potential clashes will already exist.  How then does s/he constantly: translate between processes, spot storms on the horizon and navigate through bad/good weather, all while building ever-strengthening teams?

The goal of this session is to share the lessons learned from 3 major implementations: 1. Drupal, 2. ATG/E-commerce, 3. Vignette internet and extranet sites with Content Management Systems and how the human elements of Team Dynamics can ensure Program Managers build successful teams using common sense, trust, and a sound project management methodology and framework.  Attendees should walk away with solid foundational knowledge about the: gaps and bridges between Team Members who must operate in a Global Environment without ever meeting F2F and still be able to trust and collaborate with each other and be united in an Agile methodology and solid project management framework, even when the sponsoring organization doesn’t fully embrace Agile frameworks.

Suggested Attendees: Novice or Experienced Project Manager, Tech Lead, Scrum Master or Program Manager and/or experienced Project Team Members.Though a novice project team member may benefit from this session for their own contributions to a project team, they will likely get little value out of the area of focus of this session for building teams.

Session Focus:

• Global Implementations such as a large xx.com or xx.org require global teams
• These team members rarely and sometimes never get to physically meet each other, yet have to stay focused on collaborating across time-zones, personalities, project management frameworks and even language and cultural nuances
• The Team members then also have to deal with process gaps across vendors, process gaps internal to the client's business and basic human need to have clarity in their required contribution and the ability to overcome inevitable frustration between Team Members
• This session aims to deliver and/or address:
  • Best practices for Program/Project Managers to bridge the gaps and build happy and healthy teams with a strong focus on:
    1. Human interactions when the project becomes challenging and the team members only know each other’s “conference call voice”
    2. Team collaboration in a global platform of vendor partners, program sponsors and stakeholders
    3. Translating Agile to Waterfall for Program Sponsors, Finance, IT and various other partners and stakeholders
    4. Dealing with language, culture and human idiosyncrasies
    5. And how to build teams that will successfully navigate all four of the above points
• This session will use real-life examples from prior implementations including www.novartis.com, www.redcross.org and www.beautifulmedicine.com to illustrate the success and improvement points and walk the audience through a myriad of team building techniques proven to diffuse stressful moments, bridge process gaps, ensure harmony amongst even the widest ranging cultures and foster collaboration without “taking your team for an off-site to blow off some steam”

This session is well paired with a project management model/best practice session.