Five steps to a successful global engineering project

By Geoffrey James, Contributing Writer -- Electronic Business, 5/7/2007

Other articles in our M&A series:
Lessons learned from four failed electronics mergers
M&A lessons learned: Electronics industry executives share success stories

Mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and value chains are the lifeblood of today’s electronics business. All four demand that different teams of engineers work closely together.

That can be challenging when you’re mixing and matching talent from different regions of the world. “Engineers from different cultures approach problems in different ways, and that can cause confusion and delays,” says Cherrice Traver, dean of engineering and computer science at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

We asked several experienced engineering managers how they ensure that a global engineering project doesn’t proceed according to geological time. Here’s a five-step plan to keep your global project on track.

Step 1. Locate the core team at one facility.

Needless to say, you’ll be using the entire panoply of productivity tools to coordinate and manage your project. However, if you want to make absolutely certain that the project gets done on schedule and on budget, you’d best situate the core engineering team at a single location, even if it means paying to have key personnel relocated for the duration. This isn’t to say that remote teams can’t contribute but only that it’s more productive if you can move the bulk of the project to a central spot.

For example, when IBM, Toshiba, and Sony launched the Cell CPU project, all three companies contributed engineers to the team but most of the development work took place at an IBM facility in Austin, TX, according to Chekib Akrout, a vice president at Freescale Semiconductor, who was previously the IBM vice president responsible for Cell. “Even though we were using our best-of-breed communication tools, having the key players in a single location ensured that the right meetings would take place and that the engineering teams could interlock their efforts more effectively and work toward a common outcome,” he explains.

Step 2. Pad the schedule to account for cultural confusion.

Every company has a different way of approaching an engineering project. However, differences in corporate culture are dwarfed by differences between cultures in different geographies. For example, “Japanese engineers are very data-oriented and prefer to make decisions after they have plenty of data to analyze,” explains Akrout. “By contrast, American engineers tend to make decisions based on setting ambitious objectives to overcome as-yet-unknown challenges.”

Both approaches have merit, but the combination of the two can generate arguments and misunderstandings. The burden of communicating and translating from one culture to the other inevitably takes extra time and effort. And that’s going to slow down the development process. “Collaboration requires close alignment of goals and expectations, so as technology challenges become more difficult, we end up spending more time planning our activities, especially reviewing and monitoring the risk/benefit trade-offs,” explains Mike Smayling, CTO of the Maydan Technology Center at Applied Materials.

Step 3. Become a facilitator rather than a dictator.

Because of their science-based background, engineering managers (as a rule) prefer projects to be well organized and efficient. One way to achieve this is to have strong, credible leaders who dictate exactly how project goals are to be achieved and then can manage the project according to those well-defined expectations.

However, although a highly directive management style can work well within a small group of engineers who both know and trust their management, it can create antagonism and misunderstanding in larger, more dispersed groups. Engineers who don’t know the managers well or don’t understand that kind of management style are likely to feel unheard and disrespected. Worse, remote decisions will likely seem biased toward groups that are geographically closer, even if the decisions are being made in a fair-minded manner.

In other words, cultural differences and confusions are, by definition, both messy and unquantifiable and thus require a lighter and more flexible management approach.

“I try not to be a facilitator who brings the team to the right decision,” explains Jim Kahle, an IBM fellow who contributed to the Cell project. “It’s my job to listen to all the inputs, break the ties, and make sure everyone understands why a certain decision was made.”

Step 4. Beware of legal land mines.

Projects involving multiple companies almost always involve some kind of legal baggage, usually relating to trade secrets and the ownership of intellectual property (IP). For example, when Digital merged with Compaq, Digital had service agreements with Compaq’s competitors. As a result, several of Compaq’s new employees were privy to internal information about how Compaq’s competitors operated. To Compaq’s credit, the firm’s top management made it clear that such information was not to be shared internally, according to a former engineering manager who declined to be named for this story.

However, coping with IP issues can put a real strain on an engineering team, especially when breaking the rules could get a project back on schedule, according to George Z. Thomas, a former laboratory scientist at Hughes Aircraft.

“I was responsible for helping one company bootstrap a star tracking guidance system that was virtually identical to a system I had helped develop at another firm,” he explains. “It drove me crazy to watch the team struggling to solve the same problems my former team had already solved several years earlier,” he says.

However, although stealing IP can speed a project’s completion, it’s extremely unwise, especially in today’s litigious business environment, according to Tobey Marzouk, a partner at Marzouk & Parry, a law firm that specializes in trademark and patent violations in high-tech firms. “Every year companies become more willing to sue if they believe they’ve been wronged,” he insists.

Step 5. Let engineers be engineers.

This is the easy part. Even when they’re from different companies and countries, engineers are interested primarily in engineering. And that’s good. “Engineers do not need a lot of advice on how to get along with corporate politics,” says Robert Pease, National Semiconductor’s resident analog chip design guru. “Just let them do their jobs— and have a few miniseminars, so each team of engineers can see what they can learn from the other team.”

In other words, if you lay the groundwork for success by following the first four steps, you can simply stand back and let the fun begin.