Your life couldn't be any better. You just accepted a new role as a senior consultant for a project management services firm in San Francisco, and the move is finally happening. You've got a great apartment in the Bay Area, and your excited about your new lifea fresh start. All you need to do is endure the indignity of a commercial flight to begin enjoying the good life. Just as you settle down into your first class seat on the flight from Austin to SF, your seatmate turns to you with the usual airplane small talk, but what you hear fascinates you. Your seatmate is Jessie, and this is what you learn from him. Jessie is a project manager with a large, multi-national company that provides IT services to a range of industries. The company has offices in over 10 countries with a total of approximately 15,000 employees worldwide with nearly 11,000 residing in North America. In the past, his work has primarily focused on servicing and managing some small to mid-cap clients in the southern United States for whom his company provides IT services. His local Austin team meets the vast majority of his clients' needs, although he has worked with some specialists from the home office in the Bay area of California. He recently applied for a new position within the company that focuses on providing custom software applications for mid-cap to large-cap companies, both domestic and international clients. Most projects have a budget of between $5 - $15 million and will require him to work extensively with an overseas development team, which is based in both India and China. Recently, he learned that he got the job, so he has been planning the move from Austin to SF, which was suppose to happen next month. His first project was going to be to develop a custom customer management system for a company headquartered in Germany, but with offices in the Seattle region. He'll be interfacing with a representative from the office in Seattle and a representative from the headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. That was the plan. Jessie got a call yesterday afternoon from his new boss, telling him that his start date has been moved up because the client is reading to get started on developing the customer management system. He had to grab the first flight to SF to begin building his core project team, which will be comprised of members from the Bay area office and a joint development team from the office in China and India. The client has sent over some initial user requirements for the application, which he will need to review with the team to begin finalizing an agreed upon set of user requirements, once, of course, he forms the team. He is fairly nervous He isn't quite sure how to begin working in this new environment, as he has never worked on such a culturally diverse team. He asks you for some advice, after he learns of your expertise in this area. Normally, you wouldn't offer your advice for free, but maybe you can provide him with some first steps so that he might consider bringing you in as a consultant, which would be great for your new role. Assignment Instructions: Based on the readings this week, the course lecture, and your prior professional experiences, provide Jessie with some advice for how to take cultural considerations into account when forming a virtual team. Pay attention to both social and functional diversity, providing him with a primer for how best to form the team, what to expect, and how to address conflict.

 

Explain the different types of cultural diversity

Explain some of the challenges and benefits associated with working with a culturally diverse team in a virtual environment