Mini Case $7\mathrm{.}1$: Production transfer from Denmark to India

The Danish company LK$,$ now belonging to Schneider Electronics, decided on

transferring their labour intensive switch production to its Indian Joint Venture

operation. During the planning phase, the company invested a lot in training all project team members on both sides, in Denmark and in India, in the following areas:

$1$ Language: as the Indian project members had a high proficiency in English,

their Danish colleagues needed to be brought up to a similar level by intensive language training.

$2$ Basic rules of project management: all project members were familiarized with the company$$s internal methods regarding scheduling and budgeting. The meaning of responsibilities and deadlines was also explained to ensure a

common understanding of critical terms and approaches.

$3$ Reporting: all company internal reporting templates were translated into

English and explained to all project members as the new standard for reporting and monitoring.

The Danish project manager created the project master plan including all

activities. She travelled to the Indian site to present and discuss her plan with the Indian part of the team. As everything seemed to be agreed on$,$ she returned to Denmark and was happy that all was going so smoothly. Two months later, she went on another trip to India to check the project progress against her plan. Of course, she expected all the activities for the first period to be completed as she hadn$$t been told otherwise. She was quite irritated to see that nothing at all had happened in those two months.

Questions

$1$ Identify the reasons for the problem the project manager has.

$2$ What would you have done to avoid this delay of two months?