Once the contract is signed, US companies, in general, are intent on sticking to the project timeline. The client-side resources that were to be allocated to the project at kickoff are indeed made available immediately and dedicated to the project’s success. On the other hand, a Canadian, UK or Australian company is more likely to experience some sort of ‘resource crunch’ where people are shifted to a more urgent matter that delays the project from the outset.

After seeing this happen several times and looking at the facts of each situation, my conclusion is that US companies hire people for more focused well-defined roles, and they fight hard to keep their resources on track. If a new emergency or opportunity comes along they are more likely to hire new resources or allocate other available resources specifically to the new task. They are less likely to saddle existing resources that are already assigned to other projects with multiple new projects and tasks of differing priorities. Non-US companies seem to prefer asking their existing resources to multi-task as much as possible which results in slower response times, slower growth, and higher project failure rates.

Along the same line, US companies are more likely to “keep the core and outsource the rest”. US companies tend to leverage outsourcing more as a strategic advantage. By outsourcing, they reduce internal multi-tasking and invest more in their employees to get specialized in a few key vertical knowledge segments or skill sets. In contrast, non-US companies try to do more things in-house using their own full time employees along with a lot of task juggling.

In the next blog, I will discuss my observations regarding how project scope change is handled as it relates to companies in the US and other parts of the world.