Overview

If you are leading a project team to design magnetic heads for a disk drive in the United States getting them fabricated in Malaysia and assembled in South Korea, shipping them to your customer in Japan, and camping in your customer s facilities in Japan to improve their final product yields then, as the international engineering project manager, you are definitely being challenged in this quadrangle of a maze.

If you are leading a project team to design, build, and test an equipment system in the United States for a British customer, using critical French suppliers and then shipping the system to Russia for commissioning, then you are an international engineering project manager who is being challenged on top of everything else by the dual language and the Russian technical passport requirements.

Suppose you are leading a project team to design, build, test, and deliver 40-feet electric buses for public transportation for a metropolitan transportation district in the United States, and you have two customers, namely, the metropolitan transportation district and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The bus frames are subcontracted to be designed and built in Germany. Then you have quite a few challenges in integration of components due to mixture of metric and English units and transportation of large frames without being damaged from Germany to the United States for final assembly and test.

Cultural and language differences between the customer, the subcontractors, the final product user, and your project team multiply the gravity of the tasks exponentially. A good...