CASE STUDY My company, a customized computer component designer and manufacturer, planned to increase our market share in Japan. I was given the engineering responsibility for guiding our design and application engineers to go periodically to Japan to visit our potential customers. We had to present our future products and convince our potential customers as to how advanced our products were and how advanced and controlled our manufacturing processes were. I went to Japan several times with my design and application engineers. We all were struggling to get to know the Japanese culture and their workplace ethics, such as how to greet people from your customer's end, how to exchange business cards, how to exchange small gifts, how to behave in a meeting, how to make small talk, how to behave at lunches and dinners, and so on. When I returned to the United States from my second visit to Japan, I decided that we should be trained in the Japanese business culture and language. I requested a meeting with my company's president regarding the necessary training, if we wanted to succeed in business in Japan. My company president was very receptive to my training idea in the Japanese business culture and language. He further proposed that this training should be a requirement for all of our employees who dealt with Japan. He asked me to arrange it with our human resources department. Our human resources department found a perfect trainer from the University of California. He was Japanese and he was studying for his Ph.D. degree in psychology. He came to our company every Tuesday for a year at lunchtime and trained us on the ins and outs of Japanese business culture and business language. He taught us important Japanese phrases that we could use during our encounters with our Japanese customers. He gave us recorded tapes filled with Japanese phrases so that we could practice the pronunciations at our leisure. Since Japanese is a phonetic language, we learned pronunciation of phrases with ease. Every one of my engineers who dealt with Japan, all of our sales personnel, purchasing personnel, and even executives who dealt with Japan took this one-year training course. Brown paper bag lunches were provided by the company. There were 26 trainees in the class. We had written and oral examinations once a month. Fifteen of us passed the course with flying colors including all of my engineers who dealt with Japan. Ten of us flunked the course and one dropped out because of health reasons. The course taught us a lot of small talk phrases and greeting phrases in Japanese. We learned greeting phrases such as "pleased to meet you" (hajimemashite), "good morning" (ohayo gozaimasu), and "thank you very much" (domo arigato gozaimasu). We learned the telephone hello response, which was moshi moshi. At the end of a long meeting in Japan, it was customary to write down action items on the board with the names of owners and due dates. After everyone agreed on the action items list, the scriber of meeting minutes sent the action items list to everyone involved by e-mail. Once, at the end of a 12-hour meeting, I started the action items list by writing "action items" in Japanese Kanji characters on the board. All of our Japanese colleagues almost dropped out of their chairs. They had a good laugh at the end of a long and strenuous meeting. We learned how to sit in pecking order around a conference table. As guests, our team always sat on the side of the table that was away from the conference room entrance door. We learned when to talk during a meeting. The highest-ranking member of our team always answered their questions. If that ranking member needed help from other members of his team, he mentioned that so and so would be responding to their particular question. Dinners were less formal, but again high-ranking members of both teams sat at the ends of the dinner table. A 12-hour meeting from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and afterward a 3-hour business dinner until midnight was a normal day in Japan. The one-year business culture training course for Japan helped my company to gain ground in their marketplace. After two years, we saw a 10-fold sales increase for our products in Japan. The president of my company thanked me for suggesting the Japanese business culture classes for our people. Also, everyone who took the course was very appreciative for gaining such an eye-opening experience into Japanese culture and language. - Every member of your team dealing with a foreign country has to know that foreign country's history, culture, and workplace ethics. - Knowing the business language of a foreign country that you are dealing with goes a long way in negotiations and in gaining mutual respect among players. Source: Kemal Atesmen (2015) Project Management Case Studies and Lessons Learned. Taylor \& Francis Group, LLC CRC Press Answer the following questions 1. Define the terms project and project management and discuss the difference between these terms 2. Explain the role of project managers in terms of skills, qualities and responsibilities to manage SME projects 3. Based on the case study, discuss how the project will follow the project life-cycle and discuss the relevant stakeholders of the project in the case study. Cite examples to support your answer. 4. Strategic alignment to project management is very important. Describe the five knowledge areas of management and how they relate to project management. 5. Analyse the case study and explain how it relates to the characteristics of the business focused project management (BFPM)