Global Engineering Project Management
Covering all phases of an international project with real case examples, this hands-on reference aligns real-world experiences in international project management with practical project management principals.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Global Engineering Project Management
Chapter 4: Planning an International Project
When the project is given a go ahead by upper management, you have a short time to prepare for its planning. Planning includes selecting team members, forming international teams, creating a summary of the project specifications, creating work breakdown structure, generating a list of tasks, creating the initial schedule, structuring the project information management system, generating a cost and schedule performance spreadsheet, and holding the project kickoff meetings. This initial planning period for an international project manager is a very busy and tough one and might require a lot of international travel in a very short time because the clock for the project starts to tick, and you should take at most a couple of weeks to bring everything together to launch the project domestically and internationally.
Selecting Team Members
The right domestic and international team members are key to the success of a project. You might have to create counterpart teams in a foreign country to execute an international project. Finding the right team leaders and team members in a foreign country can be tricky and very time consuming. As the project manager, interview every team member, domestic and international, face to face, learn their backgrounds, and make agreements with them on their training requirements for the upcoming project. If face-to-face interviews are not possible, perform videoconference or teleconference interviews.
For example, for an automated assembly line equipment that was designed and built in the United States and then installed and operated in Malaysia, the U.S.-based project manager had...
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