Surviving the tech manager's global squeeze

It's the new reality of IT: working as part of a global team, with coworker and outsourcers all over the world, coordinated by a project manager at headquarters. But that reality can be ugly, as managers are stretched across time zones, with no such thing as being off the clock. Work quality, commitment, and communications vary considerably, putting the burden on the manager caught in the middle to make it all work -- from thousands of miles away.

For many companies, the results are bad: Thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in wasted efforts. Software and other tech projects that don't deliver as promised. Burned-out IT managers who leave if they can, and give up if they can't.

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Unfortunately, there's no easy solution. Making global project management work requires compromises all around, compromises to which executive management are often blind and that teams in different countries see only partially, making it hard to come to a common arrangement.

Caught in the middle: Stories from the inside
Consider the case of Jill (not her real name), a project manager in a global consumer products firm. She works in the United States, but the hardware and software development teams are in India, China, and Sweden. The Swedes refuse to work outside local business hours, so she has to have meetings with them between midnight and 7 a.m. in her time zone. The Indians typically give positive status reports but say nothing when they miss delivery schedules -- even when she asks directly -- so Jill can't trust what they say and has no idea what the project status really is. The Chinese often implement code strictly to specification, not raising issues when the intent of the project isn't supported by the specs. Quality suffers. They don't respond to her requests to raise such issues before completing the code.

Jill says her U.S. managers don't care about any of these issues, saying it's her problem to figure out and that all that matters is that something ships on schedule. She's still at the company, but actively looking to leave.

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