Delivering successful projects with global teams

Unequal time zones, dissonant expectations, and different work ethics – these are just some of the issues that international project teams are facing. So how can we ensure global team success?

Text by Bernard Aschwanden

Inhaltsübersicht

Delivering successful projects with global teams

Image: © Ratchanida Thippayos/ 123rf.com

This case study examines the release of the Adobe FrameMaker 10 Reviewers Guide and my personal lessons learned in working with an international team. My role was to beta test FrameMaker and to create a reviewer’s guide together with a team in India, Canada, and the United States.

Defining a team

When a group of people comes together for a project they are called a team. People of the same team share goals and leadership. Within the scope of their project team members depend more on each other than on people outside the core collective. They have a goal and are assembled to meet that goal. In our case, we were a team pulled together with a focused goal of building a specific documentation set for a project. We had our roles, and we needed to trust each other to deliver to set expectations.

Background

Our goal was to develop a reviewer’s guide. This entailed multiple versions of an ...