The best solution is...maybe not the most comfortable one

One of the tasks of the Project Manager is to be able to identify the best approach to complete the project succesfully.

One of the challenges we need to surpass is the natural tendency to consider the best option for us as the best option for the project. This happens to project managers, to the technicians who need to provide input for the planning and WBS...basically to everybody on the loop.

Many times the easiest solution for the team members is not exactly the best option for the project. For instance: it is not necessary true in all situations that preparing a single request to vendors and setting the criteria at the highest level possible is the best option. It might be more expensive for the company ; compared to staggered controls and additional handoffs.

Ethical Behavior

We are all confronted with opportunities where another person asks us to behave in a way incompatible with our values.

My feeling is that this behavior comes from lack of confidence. And many many times these attitudes and decisions are completely unnecessary.

Clients want the truth, feel the truth and actually today can very easily check the truth! You may think you are loosing an opportunity if you say no. You are probably winning much more in terms of future opportunities and reputation if you stand strong on what you believe is correct.

Roles and Positions

In my previous post I talked about the importance of a specific role necessary in any Multilingual Language Provider.

Some of you commented that a small company could not afford to have one person dedicated to this activity only. Actually that was not exactly what I was refering too. In whatever service provider each step of the process needs a role, a responsible. This does not mean you need to have a full time person for each and every possible role. It does mean however that you need to be able to name the person accountable for each and every crucial phase of your process.

Size does not matter in this case. It could be a 200, 20, or 2 person company, but the structure needs to be there.

A similar concept is explained by M.Gerber's EMyth book http://www.e-myth.com/.

People can switch roles, and will need to wear different hats in the different situations and phases of a project or process.

Multilingual Quality: The Language Lead role

How to ensure Multiligual Quality in Localization projects? How is quality measured in this context?
On of the most important added values a Language Service Provider can provide to its costumers is the leveraged effort of interlanguage consistency (when there is a need for it: sometimes a quality localization forces for a discrepancy between languages without this being an error, but a conscious choice).
In addition in most products there is a need for an effort in the creation of guidelines, ensuring customer choices and style is replicated and followed.
Many Multilingual vendors and processes fail in this matter. Ensuring quality among multiple languages (2,4, 30...) implies an effort that a specific role has to undertake. In many companies this role is called: Language Lead.
In my opinion the big error that many vendors commit is to misunderstand that since there is not a single person who knows all the languages the agency is working in, all quality responsability and accountability remains on the hand of the single language vendor or freelancer working on the specific language target for that project.
No... it's not the same job to manage a single language or to manage multiple ones.
The Language Lead role (or activity if you prefer) needs to own and be accountable for this interlingua checks and be able to respond to most of the project queries before scaling the really client specific ones.
Often well found queries from one language apply to the rest of the languages (actually if they don't there is a big chance that this particular query is responsibility of the language specific vendor).
Specially in SLVs playing to be MLVs, this Language Lead activities are forgotten considering interlingua issues will be handled by the PMs.
How could clients know their vendor can ensure this interlingua quality? Most often it is just a matter of asking your vendor to describe the process and look for clues on how they manage multilingual content. If they only put the focus on procurement, you may have to look further.

Not to miss: Steve Jobs at Stanford year 2005 opening

Not to miss: Steve Jobs at Stanford year 2005 opening