Abstract

This case study discusses the experience of an Indian IT outsourcing and consulting company –Tech Mahindra (TechM) Limited – with a Swedish customer. It discusses the challenges faced by the company, based in Pune, India, in executing a project on account of cultural gaps. TechM, an Indian multinational provided services across the globe in the areas of engineering, information technology (IT), networking technology solutions, business process outsourcing (BPO), and telecommunications, had an IT and engineering development collaboration with Saab. The NC project, started in May 2012, faced several challenges at the beginning on the cultural and execution fronts. Raghav, the project manager who had been given this challenging task by Dinesh, had overcome these initial hiccups and made steady progress to reach a level where the client was satisfied with TechM’s service delivery. At the same time, the project had to incur additional costs to overcome certain systemic issues relating to work practices which could not be billed to the client. The challenge now for Dinesh and Raghav was to institutionalize the learnings from this project so that such problems would not recur in future projects. Also, they had to work out a way by which the additional costs being incurred on the project could be eliminated by building a culture of ‘DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME’.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• To develop an appreciation for the importance of understanding national cultures while managing international projects
• To apply Hofstede’s national culture framework to an organization operating in a multicultural context
• To develop a structured program to orient the employees to a customer country’s culture
• To develop an evaluation system to assess the suitability of candidates to work on projects in a foreign country taking into account the cultural fit.

Keywords

India, Sweden, Multi-Cultural Teams, Cross Cultural understanding, Cultural Intelligence, Hofstede’s national culture framework, Cultural Fit, DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME, Mistake Proofing, Poke Yoke, Service Delivery Excellence, Lean Management, International Projects, Cultural Gaps, Recruitment, Training