Importance of understanding cultural diversity in Client Management

PMI (Project Management Institute) is a world-renowned organization that includes several distinguished Project Managers from around the globe and has well-defined steps which can help you lead a project successfully. Personally, I gained a lot with my PMI learnings. However, today I am going to talk about Project Management skills which PMI doesn't cover at length and maybe the biggest hurdle between You and Your successful Project (especially if it’s a Fixed Price Project)

Let me take a minute to give you context. We were working on a fixed price project with a new client and I want to underline the New Client, which means we had no experience with their ways of working. To make it interesting, the client was on the opposite side of the globe. Thanks to COVID-19, we couldn't meet them even once. With this, we lost our major advantage of relationship building and knowing the client better as the client didn't entertain video calls either.

As the project was strategic in nature, we ensured our team, processes, planning, cadence, etc. were perfect and time and again, we performed interim demos for clients, so that there were no surprises in the end. Everything was on track. Then came the very important milestone i.e. User Acceptance Test for Phase 1 and like many other Fixed Price Projects, things started falling apart. We were amazed that even after so many interim demos, best practices, and design review approvals, this happen to us. In other words, the "Hofstede framework" played its part. I would love to explain the "Hofstede framework" which talks about these cultural aspects and how it can derail any well-managed project, especially when you are working with international clients, but I will keep that for another article. The only thing which we didn't do was to have our clients read the Statement Of Work and Design documents before they approved them. Could we have enforced it on the client, of course, we had all possible documentation to have our client accept whatever we delivered because everything was documented and approved on paper. Would that have helped? I don't believe so. Arbitration wins you the battle but you lose the war (in this case "client").

In my 15 years of career, I learned one thing as a leader, the key to success is to get things done in the best possible and ethical way by creating a win-win for both parties.

We went back to the drawing board and while the team was busy coding, we were studying our client's working style (i.e. understanding the Hofstede framework for that country), we understood that their style of working was non-contractual and more relationship-based. They don't worry too much about the contractual items unless they are reinforced verbally to them and then documented in short emails. With this learning, we went ahead and eventually turned the project around and this time we had a successful Go-Live.

In summary, I would like to say that apart from your best practices, it is very important to understand the working style of your client before you begin work, as that is mostly overlooked as we focus only on plans, best practices, and documentation to rely on project success.?