Managing Global Initiatives

Managing Global Initiatives

As country boundaries are getting blurred from programme and solution delivery perspective not the physical boundaries. Ability to manage the initiatives from multiple location and deliver to multiple locations are becoming critical for any organisation success or failure. No longer are the days where you can send the SWAT teams across the world to deliver ‘things’ now the solution needs to be portable across ‘the sphere’ .

To deliver the initiative/programme across world the first question that a team needs to answer is “ initiative that I am driving , is it a global “RAT”’, I will talk about what I mean by global RAT in next section but answer to this question is absolute critical for success or failure.

Global RAT..

R – Relevant - Is the initiative relevant for the geographies you want to deliver

A – Appropriate – Do you have appropriate technology, tools and process for the geographies you want to deliver

T – Transferable – If the initiative is Relevant and appropriate , is the initiative transferable.

Based on the response of above questions you can decide if the global initiative will be success, just delivered or failure. Most of the initiatives that we take in today’s world have the desire to be as standard as possible. The standard solution can work in the driving country/region but a success across the world needs more.

Another key component of the global initiative which is generally known but ignored is the Cultural Embeddedness and its impact on an initiative.

The cost impact is seen in three dimensions ( From formal to informal) as

1.       Regulative – Local rules, Laws and Governance systems

2.       Normative – Values, expectations, roles, taboos, Practices and protocols

3.       Cognitive Culture – Mental Models, Categories and Beliefs

This leads to 2 kind of overheads

1.       Coordination cost – Generally understood

2.       Institutional Cost – Generally not fully understood and cause of higher cost escalation

The chat above show a illustrative how cost escalate with cultural distance from initiative region.

Hopefully the pointers here will help you plan better in your initiative. There are multiple mitigation actions which needs to be taken to control global coordination and institutional cost.

Happy reading