A303KM –Project Management

A Study of the Alcatel-Lucent Atrium Wireless Call Server

Project, the Problems Faced and Tools and Techniques Used
to Overcome the Problems

Student Name: Azrie Aris Bin Hamza Aris

Student Number: 09063007

Lecturer: Ms Sherin

Submission Date: 9/09/2010

A303KM – Project Management Azrie Aris Bin Hamza Aris 09063007

Table of Contents

Abstract 3

1 Part I – Technical and Management Problems 4

1.1 Technical Problems 4

1.2 Management Problems 6

2 Part II - Tools and Techniques Used 8

3 Recommendations 11

4 Conclusion 15

5 References 16

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Abstract
A large number of projects undertook by different companies fail because of
complexities associated with multiple sites and time zones. Many were experiencing
difficulties with projects from two different locations, so many of them just lose hope and
had this thinking that projects that spanned multiple sites and time zones do not work.
With different countries and different time zones, it would become more complex when
cultural differences are added into the picture (Garg, 2008).

In this case study, what was discussed was how the Alcatel-Lucent Atrium Wireless Call
Server (WCS) global team overcame the challenges when delivering the projects. The
challenges that were identified were integration of the teams of different cultures and of
different time zones, sites trying to make their decisions as well as cultural differences.
Communication between the sites and the need to depend on other sites also
increased. And due to the multiple time zones, the team was working more than they
were supposed to as they were to attend calls after office hours. The growing teams
from India and China teams all proved to be challenging too (Garg 2008).

This paper is to identify and explain in detail the technical and management problems
that Alcatel-Lucent Atrium WCS Global Team faced and how they resolved the
problems with the tools and techniques they used. Other than that, this paper also
provided recommendations on how the project could be improved based on some tools
and techniques previously not used by the WCS Global Team.

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Part I - Technical and Management Problems

Let’s identify the different problems that the project faced and divide them into 2 types
-technical and management.

Technical Problems
Different Time Zones

At first, the global team attended daily conference calls for their meetings with their
counterparts from different countries. But by using these methods, the team members
were working more than they were supposed to and this may have caused poor
motivation. Together with the time differences, productivity dropped as they had to wait
for another site’s team members to complete first before any issues could be resolved
(Garg 2008).

Issues with Futuristic Team Setup

The WCS Team initially adopted the Futuristic Team Setup which was quite a new
technique in project management. But, this was not working well. They quickly found out
that the setup only worked well for some sites only. Due to that, some sites did not
adapt well to it and this caused many problems (Garg 2008).

Project Monitoring and Control Issues

What was identified in the case study is that the team had e-mail communication
problems, no common platform to discuss day-to-day project management issues and
no proper Project Management Softwares used (Garg 2008).

From the start, the global team started with having weekly project status meetings
through ad-hoc discussions and email. Through these methods, it was rather
consuming as it was taking months before they could resolve an issue. The team also
discovered that by using emails, the sites found it ineffective because there were too
many correspondence needs to be done. And with the language background of different
cultures and writing style, this made email communications less effective (Garg 2008).

Furthermore, project managers were not given an opportunity to deal with daily issues
with project management. The only way for project managers to do so, would be a

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weekly status report call that is not targeted for the discussion of such issues (Garg
2008).

As you can see, such issues only occur when there is a failure in supporting the highly
collaborative and interdependent nature of global project activities (Waddell,
Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

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Management Problems
Cultural Issues

There were differences in culture (country and functional) that are not appropriately
categorized, understood, and assimilated into the project. Alcatel being a multi-national
company had indicated in the case study that they are experienced in working with
global teams but this was not the case for this project. The management team knew that
there will be cultural issues from the start but their unpreparedness was noticeable
when they started to expand its pool of resources to include team members from other
cultures. Along the way, managing the projects became more intricate and with this
failure to manage this cultural difference constantly created problems. This could have
been addressed properly (Garg, 2008).

Site Management Issues

It was discovered by the senior management that the grey area distinguishing project
management and overall project managers from the site management and local project
managers led to the multi site issues. Because of the different priorities that the
management set, this led to some politics between the sites. It was easier to handle
technical issue conflicts than management. At times; the project managers were also
given directions that were conflicting from the site managers, the engineering
managers, and the overall project manager (Garg 2008).

Local interests of sites sometimes surfaced where resources such as human and capital
were not shared effectively. They were just keeping the resources idle and holding on to
the resources with the thinking of utilizing it in the future (Garg 2008).

There are even some who had started their own sub or mini projects, and had
implemented their own features without involving other sites. Thus, this resulted in
duplications and inconsistencies. Inter-site issues, specifically with cultural differences,
were something that needed the management to develop on (Garg 2008).

The management also found that there was a challenge in the integration of teams with
different cultures and different time zones. When a new site was introduced, they also
realized that there was a lot of communication going on between the sites. On top of

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that, existing sites did not support new sites and they were starting to blame each other
due to this factor (Gar, 2008).

Another concern that the management discovered was that different sites went for long
leaves or holidays for multiple weeks each year at different times. What they noticed
was about 20-25% of the time; one or more sites are on holidays or are not working
during those periods. This resulted in putting the teams under a lot of stress, and the
support level standards was dropping as all the sites did not have expertise in all the
areas (Garg, 2008).

Human Resource Issues

Due to the nature of the projects which require manpower who have specialized skills
and technical knowledge, this made it even more difficult for the management to look for
the right team members for the projects .The team was growing in numbers when
additional sites were added and this was particularly prevalent when the India team
increased from twenty-five to one hundred and seventy five staff (Garg 2008).

Risk Management

The overall project manager was too dependent on the local project managers to
manage their teams at their own sites while he oversees them from the US. He was not
getting actual issues from them as they were not sharing them with him but instead they
keep it to themselves and take matters in their own hands to resolve the issues. The
overall project manager was also not informed of risks that were already causing an
impact on the projects and he was also not given any insight into future risks that may
happen. Normally, the project was already impacted by the risks thus, corrective actions
could not be made by the time the overall project manager was informed (Garg, 2008).

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Part II - Tools and Techniques Used

Techniques to address Issues with the initial Futuristic Team Setup

After the failure of the initial futuristic team setup, the global team found out that
technical leadership should be spread across sites instead of focusing in the US. Thus a
new strategy was needed and so they adopted a new one called The Area Owner
Concept. What they did was to train senior members at other sites into area owners
and assign one senior member from one of the sites to each area. Area owners were
given the responsibility to provide technical guidance to area teams across sites and to
conduct weekly meetings with the sites area teams. They were also given the task to
assist to identify and resolve issues and prioritize defects. This setup helped area teams
to have a more efficient use of resources and a more effective method to resolve issues
(Garg 2008).

As a result of these changes, the technical teams were able to work more comfortably
with area owners. They gave feedback that discussing technical issues with area
owners was more effective and efficient since they had more technical expertise
compared to the project managers (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address Different Time Zones

To address this issue, the team decided to build expertise locally at each site, which in
turn reduces the need to depend on other sites. Productivity was also improved by
leveraging time zones to quickly address critical issues as one team handed issues to
another before going home, and would take over the next morning. They also ran into
issues with daily conference calls. To address this issue they spread the burden of
inconvenient times to all the sites (Garg 2008).

Tools used to address Project Monitoring and Control Issues

Initially, daily phone conferencing calls were done by the project team members, with
specific focus for each call. In addition to the daily conference calls, they made use of
collaboration tools such as instant messengers, NetMeeting and collaboration site to
improve communication. But, they were running into issues with the daily conference
calls which include quality issues such as dropped calls, noise and other interferences.

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There were zero hours of regular work-day overlap across all sites. Even how they
schedule their calls, the timings for at least two sites was inconvenient. To address this
issue, they spread the burden of inconvenient times to all the sites and just learned to
cope with the quality issues (Garg 2008).

The main tool the teams were using initially was Microsoft Project, but they found it to
be an ineffective tool for them. Thus, Microsoft Excel was used instead in all their
project monitoring and project controlling. They used Dashboards built using the
powerful programming languages of Microsoft Excel and created Spreadsheets to
monitor defects, risks, issues and actions to be taken. Reports were also created for
feature list tracking and status tracking (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address Cultural Issues

Cross culture communications training were carried out the team in the different
countries. The management were monitoring for any types of problems which included
those that may occur due to communication gaps. They knew cultural issues, if not
addressed promptly, may put their project in difficulty (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address the Site Management Issues

To resolve these issues, a system to manage resources was developed to allow any
site to allocate resources if they are not assigned. Team members were also able to
access lab resources remotely (Garg 2008).

To resolve inter-site politics, sites are given the same responsibilities. Managers had to
travel to other sites, and ensured that all sites were treated with respect. The
management anticipated that the sites’ interests should be given full attention (Garg
2008).

There were better rapport among the teams and they were able to resolve issues
effectively. Relationships between sites also improved and there is bad teamwork and
sites are more involve in making Also, they are no longer finger-pointing among team
members (Garg 2008).

As they built local expertise in all the areas, other teams supported activities of the
unavailable sites with ease. Area owners also ensured that there was smoother taking
over and handing over smooth (Garg 2008).

Techniques to address Human Resource Issues

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What the management did was to start hiring a mix of experienced members and new
graduates. While leveraging on the existing team members, who had experience in
WCS, they trained the new team members so that they would be able to do the work
more effectively and efficiently. They implemented the strategy of hiring a high number
of new graduates who had no experience. This made the learning curve for the new
graduates was long which was taking a period of six months. But the good thing about
this strategy was the team members were not reduced due to the low attrition rate (Garg
2008).

Techniques to minimize Risk

They divided big projects into many smaller projects. Each project had a definite start
and stop that are made of smaller phases of the project. They implemented checkpoints
and conducted constant management reviews before any transition was made to the
next stage of the project (Garg 2008).

Area owners, with their strong grasp of areas and dependencies on other areas, will be
able to assist to address and detect such risks (Garg 2008).

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Recommendations
Despite the fact that the global team had successfully completed the project, from the
lessons learnt from this project, they should actually further improve their project
management processes for any future projects. The initial setbacks of the project could
have been addressed earlier had they not followed some guidelines of good practices
for global project management.

Based on the Global Project Management Framework by Jean Binder which was
published on November 2007, let’s look at some of the factors which suggest good
practices required for global projects and how this applies to the WCS project. This
framework assists global project managers to focus on the advantages and address the
challenges of having project team members located across the globe (Binder 2007).
This is only used as a guideline for this paper and not the only solution available out
there

Number of distant locations

Project teams for global projects are at least located at two different geographical
locations which could be in another town, state or country. By using technologies such
as phone conferencing and videoconferencing, this will ensure the application of
communication strategies to ensure a high effectiveness level (Binder 2007).

Country cultures and different languages

Apart from having their own organizational culture, having people in the organization
from different cultures, traditions and customs can bring more diversity to the work
environment. This in turn could increase creativity and motivation as many people prefer
to work in cross-cultural environments because of the rich information exchange.
However, as in the the case in the WCS project, this diversity could also be the cause of
conflicts and misunderstandings.

International companies like Alcatel-Lucent usually establish a common language for

the exchange of information which is in this case was English. Depending on the
country, the effectiveness of communication by most non-English staff will be limited by

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their knowledge of English expressions, and vocabulary. Project leaders with better
grasp of the English language must limit their vocabulary and to use only clear
sentences and essential words. They must always check whether their foreign
colleagues understand what they are talking or discussing about.

In addition to the cross-cultural communication trainings that were conducted, what the
management could have included were customized culture immersion session for each
country as well as team building sessions before the start of any project to build better
understanding, rapport and improve teamwork among the staff. Let me stress again that
this should be done before any project to avoid any setbacks (Binder 2007).

Time zones

Managing project teams with members in completely different time zones can be very
difficult and it is near impossible to organize meetings in normal office hours. One
method is to implement a “follow-the-sun” approach, reducing the duration of sequential
tasks by a half or a third of the time. The procedures and communication rules between
sites must be accurately defined among people in “complementary” time zones when
there is low overlapping of working hours.

However delays of high importance may happen, as the communication can sometimes
take more than a week to be completed, instead of a single day. Global teams can carry
out standard communication rules and templates across locations to reduce the waiting
time as well as to reduce communication problems (Binder 2007).

Collaborative Tools and Techniques

There are two different categories within this area. Firstly, there are the collaboration
tools which are basically the different types of hardware and software to allow
communication over distance (Binder 2007).

The second category is the effective use of collaborative techniques in order to achieve
efficiency. For example, there should be common rules and tips for e-mail
communications in place between the different sites of the projects.

Thus, firstly, the hardware infrastructure for the tools needs to be improved. The quality
issues that the teams were facing with conference calls need to be removed by having
better network infrastructures at their sites. Secondly, what could have been
implemented was proper training on the use of conference calls. This training does not
only cover the technical knowledge to use the tools but also for the conference calls,

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there must be common rules, tips and step-by-step guidelines on what need to address
during the conference call meetings (Binder 2007).

Having a unified collaboration framework to minimize the impact of all barriers

With the factors in mind, let’s explore another case study of a company, Amdocs, a
global provider of customer experience systems in Israel, which wanted to help its IT
teams work more efficiently by implementing a tool from Microsoft and unified all
collaboration tools. In our opinion, with a centralized place for all the collaboration tools
a better success rate compared to the WCS project (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

Project management in this company was particularly challenging because teams

worked in multiple locations and used different software development models. To
improve workflow, Amdocs standardized its application life-cycle management
processes with Microsoft Project Server 2010.

It is also integrating the solution with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team
Foundation Server and Exchange Server 2007. System administrators were also
benefitting from deployment since now deployment is more than 50 percent faster, and
Amdocs was expecting to cut costs by streamlining project management. Employees
have Web-based access from almost any location and work more easily with a familiar
interface. Senior Management now has better project visibility, and the company can
extend the centralized solution to include more users and applications (Microsoft Case
Studies 2010).

The team that handled application life-cycle management (ALM) was based in Israel,
and the research and development and product delivery teams were located in India
and the United States. Other than working in different time zones, the IT teams used
different types of project management methodologies and tools (Microsoft Case Studies
2010).

Amdocs wanted a solution that would connect its infrastructure and its project teams in
multiple locations which was the similar case with the WCS. They provide a single view
of all the other systems in one place, including information about a project’s
development status, change configuration, and resources. They were looking for one
solution that could handle almost everything (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

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So with the help of a third-party vendor, Amdocs successfully completed a pilot project
with Project Server 2010 and began deploying the solution in its production environment
in December 2009 by a third-party vendor enterprise wide by April 2010 (Microsoft Case
Studies 2010).

By using a Microsoft Solution, Amdocs was able to integrate Project Server 2010 with
Exchange Server so that employees would be able to update tasks in the Microsoft
Office Outlook 2007 messaging and collaboration client. It is also implementing
Microsoft Business Intelligence tools such as Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint
Server 2010 that allowed them to include dashboards for management reporting similar
to the Excel Dashboards for the WCS Project (Microsoft Case Studies 2010).

The project managers in Israel normally work with the Microsoft Project Professional
2010 client software. Whereas the team leaders in India and other locations can use
Microsoft Project Web App to connect through the Internet and edit projects. In addition,
Amdocs uses Windows Communication Foundation to configure Web services that work
with multiple communication protocols and connect with more applications (Microsoft
Case Studies 2010). Thus, this created a multi-collaboration platform for all the project
teams, which could work in multiple locations

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Conclusion
Most project teams find their previous practices ineffective in today’s global business
model. This is due to the fact that it is not the work of just “one” leader that delivers
business results, but of senior managers and project managers as a collective team that
happens to be separated by distance, time and culture that drive global project teams to
success. Many senior leaders, who started on a globalization strategy as in the case of
the Alcatel-Lucent, fail to anticipate the number and severity of barriers such as those
indicated earlier during project execution (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

Without removal of the barriers, global teams fail to perform their function and
successfully address the challenges they face (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

Firstly, it is important to describe the responsibilities between senior managers and

global project team leaders. Senior management of an organization is best positioned to
address the global barriers. The global team leaders for the WCS project, the overall
project manager and area owners are best positioned to address the global challenges
or problems.

Secondly, global barriers should be addressed by senior management first before

expectations are set to the global team leaders to make progress on resolving the
global team challenges (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010). What this means is
that the senior management should have addressed all these issues beforehand rather
than taking a “wait and see” approach when the project implementation was on-going.
With understanding that the management was trying to keep costs low, many initiatives
or creative ideas brought forward by the project leaders from different sites might not
have been approved by them and this might have resulted in many limitations.

Poor initial planning of organizational structures can limit collaborative team dynamics
necessary in a global development model. As in the case of the WCS project, there
should be thorough research and analysis of the Futuristic Team Setup before rolling
out this idea. There are other models and frameworks for global projects out there.

Leveraging on technology is also important as it would be able to overcome the global

barriers that companies may face when working on global projects, as in the case of the
Amdocs Case Study. The management from Alcatel-Lucent should know by now that

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globalization is taking place and the world is getting flat. If the company is taking too
slow to adapt to technological changes, they will lose out to its competitors who are
moving faster than them in this area. For a company that specialized in providing audio
video conferencing as well as unified communication solutions, there was no clear
indication that they were using their own solutions which was rather strange and
disappointing. Why this is so is quite questionable.

Apart from technology, People also play an important part too and it is critical to have
the right people to perform their functions well. That is why training them extensively is
very important and moreover, they are employing new talent instead of experienced
members.

Last but not least, global organizations need to have the right structures, people,
processes, and technologies that foster a high degree of collaboration. With all this in
mind, this will in turn save time, money, human resources and ensure higher project
success (Waddell, Rahschulte, & Martinelli 2010).

References
Garg, Ram 2008, Delivering Multiple Sites and Time Zones Project: A Case Study in
the Telecom Industry, PM World Today – November 2008 (Vol X, Issue XI), viewed 28
August 2010, http://www.pmforum.org/library/cases/2008/PDFs/Garg-11-08.pdf.

Binder, Jean, 2007, Global Project Management Framework - The framework: 25

knowledge areas, viewed 2 September 2010,
http://www.globalprojectmanagement.org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=6&Itemid=40

Microsoft Case Studies 2010, Amdocs - Software Engineering Firm Improves Workflow,
Streamlines Project Management, viewed 28 August 2010,
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?
casestudyid=4000007230

Waddell, J, Rahschulte, T & Martinelli, R 2010, Leading Global Project Teams: Barriers
& Challenges, Part One of a Six - Part Series, PM World Today (Vol XII, Issue VII),
viewed 1 September 2010,
http://www.pmforum.org/library/tips/2010/PDFs/july/Advisory-Waddell-Rahschulte-
Martinelli.pdf

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