More on Culture

As I mentioned in my last blog post, one of the presentations at last week's P2P was on the challenges of implementing Agile in the Egyptian culture. Since I'm working with a team in India, I wanted to take a look at how Indian culture aligns with Agile.

One area of consideration is that of the self-organizing team. Indian culture supports team work. However, there is also respect for hierarchy, so the team may not feel empowered to make decisions. The team may feel the need to defer to a senior person for decisions. I have found that I am being asked to make more decisions compared to a US based team.

Indian culture also tends to avoid open confrontation. I think some conflict can be good as the team is developing. On my US-based teams, it isn't unusual for one developer to provide constructive criticism to another's work. This type of feedback should be delivered with a softer tongue for my off-shore team.

Another area that I have noticed relates to communications. Indian culture puts more emphasis on written communications. I know my off-shore teams have often asked for more formal requirements documents than what I expect from a US based team. One adjustment I've had to make is to provide more documentation for my off-shore team to work from.

Indian businesspeople tend to be tough, smart negotiators. While this conflicts the idea of customer collaboration over contract negotiation, successful negotiation is built on trust. However, building this trust can take time. In my case, I had time to start working on building that trust before the project work started up.

So what does this really mean? First, my points are just generalizations. For anyone working with other cultures, this type of understanding is just the starting point. You shouldn't rely solely on generalizations for determining how to work with your team any more than you would use New Yorkers as a benchmark for working with Americans from other parts of the US. For any cross-culture work, take the time to know the people you are working with.

Projects to the Point 1st Impressions

Day 2 of Projects to the Point has wrapped up and so far it has been an interesting conference. One of the themes of the opening day was change. Emad Aziz from Brisk Consulting talked about how change is the only constant. As project managers, this is what we have to deal with. Related to that, Dr Mohamed Tewfik Elmasri talked about organizations that are transforming (such as through a merger/acquisition) and how a key part of the change management process is communications; "People can deal with bad news, people can't deal with uncertainty."

Another interesting presentation was by Ali Zewail and ElMohanned Ahmed. They discussed the challenges of implementing agile in an Egyptian company from a cultural perspective. They even compared the principles of the Agile Manifesto to the cultural attributes of Egyptians. It made me think about my team in India and how agile aligns or conflicts with some of their cultural characteristics.

Culture

So what's the culture like at the place you work? Is it focused on the success of the company, or individuals? Do people work well together or is there friction? What have you done to make the culture better?

I worked in one organization that started to rank employees as part of the annual performance evaluation. The people ranked high got raises, the ones at the bottom of the list were at risk for loosing their jobs. This made for a very competitive workplace (i.e., backstabbing). I am glad not to be there anymore and as I was looking for a new position, I asked about the culture and how they handled performance reviews to make sure I didn't get into the same boat again.

At my current company, they took the time as part of the on-boarding process to talk about the culture of the organization, and it wasn't just an HR person reading off a set of slides. It was one of the VPs that had been with the company and could talk to how the culture has evolved over the years. This step keeps the culture evolving in a positive manner so that the company continues to be successful.