Rosemary Hossenlopp, founder of Project Management Perspectives is the facilitator of an audio series by key project management professionals on what Business Leaders must understand about accelerating execution of strategy through project work.

She interviews Rafay Badar, the founder and CTO of Emilia LLC in Dubai. Rafay is a PMP, Computer Engineer, MBA and an Organizational Project Management Maturity (OPM3) consultant. Over the last 14 years Rafay has been passionately involved in offering value Project Management services to his clients in the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) and South Asia. Rafay has vast experience in both the functional management and project management arenas working for multinational companies with multinational teams.

Click below to listen to the interview. Approx 7 minutes.
Click Here

The project management industry is facing challenges. One of them is delivering value on complex, multi-country, multi-vendor, multi-sourced projects.

Rafay Badar is interested in this topic based on his experience and background.

Rafay explains that there are over 4 Million people in UAE out of which 3.62 million are expats. In his 9 years of professional experience in UAE, he has seen the importance of cultural awareness in business. There are people with diverse cultures that live in harmony here and produce world class results. Rafay has personally worked on billion dollar project with a team comprising of Europeans, Asians, Africa, Far East and natives. However, things can get real complicated if you in a leadership or project management position overlook culture. He advises new comers in UAE to be patient and calm for the first 9 months – this is the estimated time one need to overcome the ‘cultural shock.’

As a young kid from Pakistan, he had the opportunity to study in an International School in New Delhi, India. His university education has been in Pakistan and US. He lived and worked in Germany. What he learned is that Cultural Sensitivity is vital to the success of an organization.

There is a big drive for ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ as companies move off-shore, outsource or the latest trend ‘multisource.’ Cultural and Emotional intelligence can provide the needed impetus for successful project deliver.

Developing High Performance Team Insights

In his experience in Projects he has seen some magnanimous leaders and some impudent ones. They both deliver; but, one leaves bodies on the field and blood trail leading to the corner office, the other however is the one who everyone is yearning to work for. He’s worked for clients who are very sensitive to scope, features and compliance and where the whole workforce align themselves to become ‘error detectives’ regards to the project goals.

On the other hand there are companies who have culture focused on functionality and they are flexible in areas which require fulfillment of project objectives.

You also understand that there are external cultural factors, e.g. in US a written contract is a must whereas in the middle east business leaders shy away from detail contract documents. For them power lies in the ‘unknown’ so details contract are discouraged. On the other side of spectrum, they regard themselves to be on a high moral ground and do not seem it fit to have a written contract when the ‘intent’ is good.

Knowledge of these external and internal cultural factors together with a multicultural team is absolutely essential. In the past 15 years the amount of research on this topic has increased.

Who is Responsible for Project Outcomes? The General Manager or the Project Manager?

Here comes the big question about responsibility. Who is responsible for setting the organization culture? While the leadership in the organization sets the mood, the project managers close to the ‘action’ are responsible for setting up the project culture. These days there is a trend of mega projects which require greater cultural sensitivity then before.
Project is affected by the culture of their team as well as the place of operation. Culture related risks must be considered and evaluated along with other risk areas
So, how do we define the do(s) and don’t(s ) or day-to-day decision making and the policies and procedures for the quick execution of project towards its intended goal.
We need to be able to adapt the project plan with respect to culture, we need to include values, norms, morals, rituals, perceptions, role/responsibility in our stakeholder analysis, we need to lay out a ‘team charter’ with specifics of engagement. One way to analyze this is to take a cultural snap shot when you take over a project, then, there are two say’s: adapt the project to culture, or adopt controlled change management to benefit project objectives.

Rafay Badar shared that Senior Leaders can help enterprises improve their project performance by spending time on cultural issues.

He is a senior project management leader.
He knows how to use his knowledge of cultural issues to improve project outcomes.
He knows how to manage complex, cross cultural projects.

He can be contacted at Emilia LLC.

Tags: Computer Engineer, Cultural Awareness, Cultural Sensitivity, Dollar Project, First 9 Months, Functional Management, Key Project, Management Perspectives, Multinational Companies, Multinational Teams, New Comers, New Delhi India, North Africa, Professional Experience, Project Management Industry, Project Management Maturity, Project Management Position, Project Management Professionals, Project Management Services, South Asia, University Education

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