Successful management of complex, multinational R&D projects

The fundamentals of project management are changing because of the globalisation of markets, mergers of international companies and integration of managerial and business processes in global corporations. A clearly recognisable trend in multinational companies since the mid-1980s has been globalisation of R&D and competence portfolios. Applied development is usually conducted in the form of a distributed project organisation. A project team is formed across geographical, organisational and cultural boundaries, engaging in a project with a global focus. Although a multinational project organisation has great potential in many dimensions, there is no doubt that the execution of a distributed high-technology project is still a great challenge. This paper identifies prerequisites for further improvement in the management of distributed projects with global goals. The authors focus on the practical experiences of the execution of complex multinational dispersed projects in the area of applied systems development in the power industry.