Project Management in a cultural context

Theories of project management are well structured guidelines to bring projects to
success. Available studies on project success factors stress out that commitment on decisions,
reliability and engagement within organizations as well as the benefit for the project sponsor
decide over success or failure. In an international context projects face other cultural, technical
and economic challenges. For project teams that work together in EU-funded projects the
acceptance of cultural differences and the consideration of one´s own and foreign cultural
peculiarities form the basis for a successful cooperation. These projects usually produce results
for several project sponsors, decisions are made by the coordinator and not directly with the
project manager on the partner side. Agile methodologies are simply not possible and project
communication is well defined in the project planning phase and alignments are difficult to put
through. The authors of this paper stress out that one important project success factor are
culture. According to current literature this issue in the context of international project
management has potential for further research. With the aim to close this gap a set of selected
EU-funded projects are analysed for success factors and problem areas. This paper provides the
criteria catalogue of the conducted analysis and a recommended course of action.