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Having himself worked on projects in several countries our host Cornelius Fichtner was very much looking forward to this interview with Randy Magdaluyo. Randy works for a financial services provider in the USA and was given the opportunity to work as the IT lead on a project in Europe. This project brought together a team from 3 continents. We are discussing the project itself, its cultural and communications challenges, the success factors and what Randy did to overcome his personal culture shock. As usual we also have our helpful resources that complement this interview and we give away a license to the project management methodology of our sponsor www.mpmm.com. The giveaway ends on August 27, 2007. Listen to this episode to learn how to participate.

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When your project fails, your sponsor will only call one person into his office to discuss this failure... you. As the project manager you are responsible for the success and failure of your projects. And that holds true, even if the reason for this failure was outside your span of control, even if you work in a matrix environment in which project managers normally lack formal authority. Yes, we all know that responsibility and authority should be in balance, but more often than not, your responsibility outweighs the formal authority that you receive. You have to fall back to other forms of authority - referent authority, expert authority, reward authority and penalty authority. Thomas Cutting, PMP, has written a series of articles on authority in his blog at www.cuttingsedge.com [Update: The web page is no longer available so we removed the link] and we are happy to have Thomas on the program today. We look in detail at the various types of authority, how they apply in a matrix organization and in a projectized organization and we look at what you can do to regain your authority if you think that you have lost it. As project managers, we don't think about authority often enough. It seems to be something that sort of "just happens". This discussion will give you a lot of food for thought and you will look differently at your personal authority next time that you accept a project.

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You will probably have noticed that communications technology seems to make the world smaller and smaller and that our project teams are suddenly all over the planet. Your sponsor is in Germany, your customer is in Chile, your engineer in Togo, two designers are in Sidney and you yourself are leading this team while sitting with your laptop on the beaches of Tahiti. What a great life we PMs have! But unfortunately, these virtual teams are quite demanding. You must deal with a multitude of cultures, several time zones and the fact that your team doesn’t have a chance to meet face to face. That is not an easy task. Adrienne Keane can help. Adrienne is a PMP® credential holder and manages virtual teams for Cisco systems. She also teaches a seminar on Effective Virtual Management at the University of California Irvine. And today you will hear her best practices.

Click here to download Adrienne's presentation (*.pdf)...

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In today's episode of The Project Management Podcast™ we welcome back Dina Henry Scott, PMP, who is the host of the Controlling Chaos podcast. We discuss our successes and failures, what we like and don’t like about our projects, we discuss our PMOs and we look at the the methodologies that we use. We finish it off with with the one thing that we wish we could change in our company. Oh... and we are having a lot of fun with it, too. This is everyday, real life project management brought to you by our combined experience.