I’m pleased to say that one of my recent blog articles has been published on “Techwell.com”, where I have contributed as a guest author. I’d love to hear what you think, so please take a look and add a comment on the site.
An excerpt from the article is shown below:
Excerpt
In his recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Peter Bregman describes a scenario where a hopeful employee missed out on a promotion in part because he didn’t say thank you. I can only begin to imagine the employee’s disappointment over what appears to have been such a trivial oversight.
This example highlights the importance of having an appreciation for the corporate culture and the national culture of the organization and the stakeholders with which you are working. This appreciation of culture—including national culture—is of paramount importance on projects too.
Many projects today span organizations, countries, and time zones. Business analysts and project team members will be interacting with multiple stakeholders, potentially distributed all over the globe.
The reality—and this certainly won’t come as a surprise—is that different cultures aredifferent. They have different values, norms, rituals, and expectations. This complex stakeholder landscape raises the risk of inadvertent misunderstandings, conflict, and culture clash.
When working with stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements, it’s essential to build rapport—and this requires empathy and understanding of differences in cultures.
One of the challenges is that while it’s easy to observe the culture of others, it’s often difficult to look introspectively and observe our own culture…
Click on the link below to read more:
http://www.techwell.com/2013/02/cultural-differences-matter-project-stakeholders