As much as I love talking about my research on AI, the truth is we are still doing IT transformations everywhere. Big corporations headquartered in Western Europe or the US often set global standards from the top. What they forget is that rollout needs to be adapted, to local regulations, language, and sometimes culture, or adoption fails.Finding your way to adapt a project rollout to different audiences is a real challenge.

I have worked on different global projects, and between all the diversity campaigns, meetings with regional offices, and workshops to make sure we captured all MVP requirements, what really made the difference for one project's success was listening to the real end users. Not the manager. Not the supervisor in the country. The user who is actually doing the operations, the person dealing with the system day to day.

The problem is that most of the time, especially in global projects, end users are rarely involved in crucial decisions. Language barriers between head office and regional offices get in the way. Cultural differences around who is allowed to say what in a meeting with HQ can also play a role, which gets complicated because even when a user at a regional office is invited by their manager to a call, they might not raise the obvious problem and choose to stay silent instead.

💡One concrete example was bringing regional users into the test phases of a project we were developing, from the various regional locations we had. That helped us in more than one way. We could see which country would actually use which functionality more. Users got the chance to exchange experiences with each other. And most importantly, we found bugs and showstoppers that well drafted test cases and alignment calls alone would never have caught.

Every step of project management matters, but if you work on a global project, my recommendation is to involve regional end users as early as possible, from stakeholder feedback through business case collection.

If you are changing a system, you are also changing how people work. Bringing in different points of view early can save you a real amount of time, money, and headaches, and it can show you problems you would never have seen otherwise. And you, do you have any additional recommendation?

#EndUserExperience #globalprojects #stakeholdermanagement #agiletransformation