Is project management a standard or cultural process?
But this is not just an East/West issue; we experienced two very different approaches to safety management during a major project review in Pakistan. The hierarchal and procedural culture of the Indian sub-continent was quite different to the ‘team/group’ culture of the Chinese engineering company building the project.
In this ‘culture clash’ the Pakistani engineers were focused on documented safety procedures, the Chinese engineers and builders were focused on developing a group understanding of the risk through discussion and observation to make sure no one in their closely knit team was put at risk of injury; they saw the paperwork as superfluous. Both sides took safety seriously; the approach embedded in culture to achieving the ‘safe outcome’ was quite different.
Another significant area of difference is communication. In most Western cultures, the sender must make the message clear. But as Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book Outliers, in Korea and many other Asian countries the listener must make sense of what is being politely intimated by the sender, particularly if the sender is junior to the receiver of the message. Excessive ‘clarity’ would be seen as impolite behaviour.
Managing issues
Similarly managing issues effectively is culturally sensitive. In Japan, the concept of nemawashi (pre-arrangements) moves contentious items forward so there are no disagreements in meetings. Even making a decision can be seen as a failure, decisions should emerge from the group rather then be imposed on the group by a project manager.
As the Japanese proverb says, ‘the nail that sticks up gets hammered down’. Consequently, nemawashi makes ideas such as a PMO fearlessly reporting schedule slippage or cost overruns at a meeting almost untenable. The information needs to be subtly conveyed and the actions agreed before the meeting to maintain the integrity of the group. Depending on your viewpoint, nemawashi can be thought of as ‘dealing under the table’ western or as a type of smoothing ‘finding the root of the problem and using some Delphi technique to circulate around the stakeholders to build consensus’ eastern.
There is no right or wrong in culture: the Chinese ran an incredibly successful Olympics, Japanese industry dominates in many areas, and South Korea has a long history of successful project delivery. The key question is how much additional value could a cultural adaptation of PMBOK Guide contribute to the development of project management in these and other cultures?
There are advantages to a standardised world wide view of project management and there are advantages to developing culturally relevant adaptations. The approach favoured by Robert Higgins (another contributor to Advising Upwards) is to clarify and simplify the PMBOK to transform it into a diamond of knowledge. Like a diamond it needs to be discreet, clear and hard.
The ideas in a robust, clarified, PMBOK can be translated easier. Clear ideas spread naturally by communication, and because culture is a shared system of beliefs or values based on a common understanding of these ideas, having one robust and clear PMBOK is the greatest strength for creating a global project management culture. From this base, project managers can use the baseline culture of project management to create common ground in a multi-national teams and adapt to the other aspects of culture in any location.
An alternative perspective suggests processes that are not culturally effective get ignored or bypassed, devaluing the overall value of the ‘body of knowledge’. With both the 5th Edition of the PMBOK Guide and ISO 21500 in development, I feel we need to have more discussion around implementation of the ‘knowledge’ within cultures. Can one size fit all?
* PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) is the registered trade mark of the Project Management Institute
