Cultural Awareness

Cultural awareness or intelligence defined by (Aldhaheri, 2017) in general means understanding capability of individuals on how they work and have control efficiently. In the past few years, due to globalization there has been a huge growth in percentage of people migrating to different countries for various purposes mostly for new career options. Apart from people migrating there is a growth in projects being outsourced to other countries and also having project team members from various geographical locations. All these factors have been contributing to project teams having cross cultural members who bring innovative thinking and are being the sources of different experiences due to their unique cultural characteristics. Cultural awareness is considered to be an important soft skill experience needed in project management to have successful projects along with hard or technical skills like scheduling.

Cultural awareness enables one to know how to apply a strategy, work with multiple teams, transfer knowledge to a team comprising people from different cultural backgrounds, as every team member or team might understand the actual intent of what is being conveyed differently. As per the research done by (Ajmal, Helo, & Kaseem, 2017) effects of having cultural differences between teams or team members could either be hurdles for collective performance or could be the important strategies that could help the organizations to have a long run with a professional reliability. Cultural differences not only mean that they are from a different culture but also that they are from different working environments like the methodologies (agile, waterfall) they used to work.

Cultural awareness training and it’s results. To sustain the cultural differences and have successful projects the project management should be training their mangers and team members as well. As per the research done by (Isaac, Rahimi, Meshkati, Madabushi, & al, 2005) NASA has conducted training sessions for their teams to learn about the cultural awareness and it resulted changes that are in progress. To have success with these trainings the project management should show a strong interest. (Isaac, Rahimi, Meshkati, Madabushi, & al, 2005) in their study have compared numerous NASA locations and other vendors results in key risk and safety related areas, which showed that the results would impact decision making process, conflict resolution, risk assessment, possibilities and reserve planning in the upcoming projects. The study by (Isaac, Rahimi, Meshkati, Madabushi, & al, 2005) mentions that have used NASA’s Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS) to know that they had some processes set by their investigation board in place that gathered lessons learned due to the mistakes made in the past. Even with the process of collecting information regarding the lessons learned was done they were never successfully able to apply those to new projects. This was also observed in other industries culture were implementation of the lessons learned in their following projects was not fruitful.

The research done by (Isaac, Rahimi, Meshkati, Madabushi, & al, 2005) have mentioned some of the key actions and the results that were due to lessons learned, which are:

• There was a successful culture change by developing a brand-new organized project, process management tools and executions based on the lessons learned.

• The training helped the project managers to have a clarity over the project budget, scheduling, quality and understand on how to approach their trade-offs and interactions with the teams.

• They had standardized some of new practices and procedures of development.

The results found in the study can be achieved by numerous industries based on the information available through which the project management should step up and implement new process and practices.

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