Project Management: Local to Global
In 2002, Thailand joined the international consortium for the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). Coordinated by Babson College, USA and London Business School, the GEM project is a global survey conducted annually to assess entrepreneurial activity in the participating countries. Begun as a pilot study in 1998 with six countries participating, the project momentum has built up such that 45 countries were involved making the project truly global in scope by 2008. Each participating country provides a research team to gather national data which is submitted to GEM data processing centre in London. Initially, the team for Thailand comprised a two-person team of faculty from the College of Management Mahidol University (CMMU). Managing local participation in an international project raised a number of key issues, including allocation of resources (including time and budget), the deployment of people, and mobilisation of work effort towards deadlines set by the international consortium. Sensitivity was required because participation in an external project encroached on resources allocated to internal organisational development.
Project Lifecycle
The team took a project lifecycle approach and divided the anticipated timeline into five discrete stages: pre-participation, planning, execution, delivery, and post-delivery.
We liked the concept of discrete phases for the project which we believed would impose a certain order on what we envisioned could become chaotic. We found this framework attractive because it seemed to allow us to demarcate our labour and to provide start and completion dates for our tasks. But, for us, a weakness of this framework is its representation of project management as linear process. This did not wholly accord with our own prior experiences of managing projects. In planning our participation in the project, we designed processes of iteration to back-check on progress and quality.
In the Pre-participation Phase were activities intended to gain supporters for the project. For some, the project was ‘an unprecedented opportunity’, for others it encroached on scarce resources. A high priority was to seek operational funding from already stretched budgets. In this, a key activity was publicising the project and its benefits to both internal and external stakeholders. The quest for external backers for the project was time-consuming and, often, frustrating. However, in so doing, we identified interested parties who asked to be informed of the project findings.
