OR/MS Today - April 2001 Worldwide Consulting Lessons Learned from International Projects By Laureano F. Escudero Since large-scale, international projects carried out by multi-disciplinary teams often last several years and are generally quite costly, funding institutions need to go many layers deeper in assessing the value of their investments. This takes time; contract preparation alone can extend for six to eight months. Depending on the local business culture, the contact with the user institution might be made at the highest level of management or stop at the operational level. Most of the projects referenced in the introductory note involved top management. When you have end-users on one hand and the model and algorithm development teams on the other, reaching consensus on what is the real problem and how long it will take to solve is a difficult, time-consuming task. Once the system has been developed, an overlapping task with the system's implementation takes a central place: securing the support of different organizations from the user institution, such as procurement, production, planning, marketing, control and human resources, among others. Without their support, the application will most likely fail. Given the R&D character of the applications as well as the budget that is required (several million Euros), some external funding support is necessary, perhaps from national or international sources. The European Commission has different R&D framework programs where OR projects can be co-financed. Note: The author has consulted on dozens of real-world applications of mathematical programming in the broad areas of supply, production, allocation, distribution, scheduling and dynamic planning. The projects ranged from hydrothermal and electric power-generation management and maintenance to manufacturing operations, oil production and water resource management. In many cases, the projects involved international teams working for multi-country stakeholders over extended periods of time. The biggest cases were carried out by large, international consortiums and companies and co-financed by international governmental institutions such as the European Commission. In this essay, the author recounts his international experiences while noting some of the common, non-technical aspects of the projects. The EC requires the international consortium have a European flavor in terms of its partners, the strong involvement of the end-users and the general applicability of the project's results in the given sectors, as well as the scientific dissemination and the plan for the commercial implementation of the results. These requirements are beneficial for the projects. As a consequence, the problem-solving approach is very focused on real-life problems. The potential risk of end-users changing priorities along the project life, given its long duration, is easily detected and analyzed. And, finally, the multiple-player composition of the end-user institutions (either from different countries or different sectors, or both) facilitates the development of scientific approaches with a more general applicability. International projects typically run the risk of misfocusing goals and often encounter delays due to different scientific problem-solving cultures. The last element, however, can have a positive impact. In any case, strong leadership is needed for these projects. Communication, specifically the method of communication, is another important issue with any international project. A difficult problem, the R&D character of the applications and the need for complete understanding and integration of the staff from different cultures, countries and environments all demand face-to-face meetings, particularly early in the project lifecycle. However, email and the Web are also crucial for the success of these types of OR applications. Once the critical first phase of the project is completed (in our case, around six months), meetings can be replaced with written and visual electronic communication. Even more, the Web makes it much easier to communicate the directives, minutes, cases, software, documentation, program execution, results and feedback. As a worthy final note, barring very few exceptions, the different cultures of the projects' partners and the political factors in the countries involved did not play an important role in any misunderstandings and delays of the projects. Laureano F. Escudero is a professor of Centro de Investigación-Operativa at the Universidad Miguel Hernández in Elche, Spain Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 2001 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 2001 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.