Multinational Information Technology Project Management

With more and more multinational IT companies investing and setting up R&Dcenters in China, there will inevitably be an increasing number of IT projects completedthrough cross-regional, cross-country and cross-cultural collaborative manner. Under sucha trend, this article focuses on the multinational IT project management and how toimprove the efficient cooperation of the team and reduce the risk of the project.In the path of developing the traditional IT project management, there are twoproblems that cannot be ignored: one is, whether at home or abroad, the success rate ininformation systems project development is still not high, and projects are often beyondthe expectations in teamwork, cost or function. The other one is, IT project success evenin the traditional sense, also did not achieve corresponding commercial value, that’sso-called information paradox. For many years the deviation between expectation andthe results forces people to seek for the method from all kinds of ways to eliminate theunpredictable IT application process, project management theory has thus formed and begradually improved. Take the traditional project management theory as base, thecharacteristics and modes of multinational IT project management by comparing withtraditional one as foundation, the IT project cases through international cooperationwhich the author participated in foreign companies as demonstration, this articleresearches the issues that encountered in multinational IT project management while notbe covered in theory knowledge of traditional project management, pointing out theimportance of cross-cultural teamwork and risk-controlling in project management.Finally by proving the development system of GM’s project for India author participatedin, this article analyzes and discusses the characteristics and patterns of the global ITproject management in actual project, and then point out the importance of culturalbackground differences on project success, proposing the project manager’s culturalbackground with customer background’s match at the beginning of the project.Meanwhile this article emphasizes in the international IT project management, a strongproject manager is one of the important factors of the success of the project.Multinational IT project management is becoming a trend, playing a positive role in the development of national economy and IT talent pool, so that cultivating the talents hasbecome the top priority in current education.