In this Video Gary Thomas talks about Agile Project Management and interculturality.
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Buzzword, Bandwagon or Big Idea?
Like many of you, in the last couple of years, we have witnessed the spread of Agile Project Management across corporations everywhere. It took a while until we started to take a closer look at what has been happening and whether it makes sense to augment our offering of international and intercultural HR development accordingly.
So is Agile the new penicillin that cures all corporate ailments or a trend like Kaizen, TQM, the Frisbee or the floss? Our observation is probably the same as yours. That Agile has a huge amount of merits which can be drawn from its origins in IT in harnessing new approaches and applying new technologies. Hence, the revolution we have all observed. At the same time, at the risk of being blasphemous, it is probably not for everybody.
The bigger question for us in our provision of international and intercultural training coaching & workshops has been whether we it makes sense to offer new solutions that make agile teamwork easier and better, rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. The realization we came to is yes.
Agile Project Management is impacted big time by two complications. What to do when agile meets virtual? When your agile team is in different locations? And when agile meets intercultural. When cultures meet, agile is not the same as agile. Cultural differences impact how we build trusting relationships, how we handle short term, iterative loops rather than long term planning as well as what we expect from our leaders and managers. Culture impacts the directness of our communication and the clarity of our messages.
So our focus is on agile project management in the virtual, intercultural context. As you can imagine, the training we are offering on these topics is selling like hot cakes. The global teams we are helping are adapting agile project management in ways that really suit them.