International workplaces can be challenging and confusing. The challenges and confusion can be multiplied when working in a foreign location, and on an international project, with participants from around the globe.
There are the obvious challenges of overcoming language barriers and time zone differences. But there are often subtler challenges too, such as meeting protocols, contract interpretation, design process and risk management. See how much of the below you recognise.
You call a design development meeting and ensure that the correct organisations are invited and the invitees are all of appropriate seniority. The meeting goes, as far as you can tell, pretty well and you emerge with some agreements and some actions allocated to the participants. You send the minutes out asking for comments. You get no responses so you assume that (a), the minutes have been accepted and (b), the allocated actions are all under way. After a couple of weeks, though, the silence is beginning to worry you, so you call around and find the following:
Participant A didn’t agree that the hazard analysis was necessary as his training, and previous project work, always called for design to code compliance and that’s what he is continuing to do.
Participant B was overwhelmed by the openness and assertiveness of the meeting so didn’t challenge the discussion regarding him having to contact his interface partner – an action which, in any case, his boss had warned him could involve additional, un-budgeted design.
Participant C comes from a background where design and build contracts have never been done before. She has carried on with her design development without regard to any of the agreed value engineering and the contractor’s deadlines.
Participant D’s English, it turns out, is pretty weak and she has ignored the minutes; particularly the profusion of acronyms used, hoping that she didn’t have to do anything.
Depending on where you are in the project cycle you either (a), call another meeting or (b), panic!
I may have exaggerated the above, to make a point, but how can we avoid similar misunderstandings arising?
I suggest the Project Director should have in his or her schedule a line item that is called something like 'Project Alignment'. Assuming the default position of an international project having English as its contractual language, the content should at least include the following:
- A project dictionary in English with all significant contractual, technical and procedural terms spelled out with definitions. The terms in the dictionary are the ones to be used in all meetings and correspondence.
- A description of the roles and accountabilities expected of each party under this particular contract form.
- A briefing of what the major drivers are, in principle, for each of the contractual parties in this form of contract.
- A description of the risk management framework inherent in the contract.
- A schedule of meetings where the above are discussed, regularly, at all the relevant levels of seniority in the project management team.
Fanciful and naïve? Perhaps. But, I am willing to bet that most of the readers of this article have met at least one of the meeting participant types I describe above.
Would what I suggest cost money? Yes, of course. Would the cost be more than offset by reduced delays and misunderstandings, re-design and claims? Almost certainly.
Mr Harry Roberts FIEAust CPEng NER
UAE Chapter President and Chartered Engineer
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF EITHER ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA OR THE AUTHOR’S EMPLOYER