The Swiss Project Management Journal
The People Project
projects in New York City. The triple con-
straint of time, quality and money was a
waking nightmare when faced with
translating 300,000 pages from a some-
what obscure language into English in six
months. While a good translator can only
translate about 10 pages per working day,
more with the aid of machine translation
but then adding time that needs to be
dedicated to verifying the translation,
assembling enough translators to do the
work within the time and quality con-
straints set out by the client and the
determined court date required frank and
open conversations about budgets, time-
lines and expectations. In this case, the
most challenging stakeholder was the
large team of high powered lawyers, who
were ill accustomed to not getting what
was asked for on their terms. My role in
these kinds of projects was to gently
communicate reality to stakeholders who
had no experience in translation (and
mostly did not speak a foreign language at
all), yet exercised absolute authority over
it. But managing the stakeholders was not
the hardest part of these projects. A sys-
tem had to be developed to keep the
translations consistent in tone and in the
use of specific terms even with over 100
translators producing documents. Hind-
sight now lets me see that this is quite like
the task set forth when assembling code
from different developers on a software
project into a single program, with the
similar associated risk. In the case of this
particular project the risk was the billion-
dollar lawsuit involved (ironically, related
to bad implementation of a software pro-
ject). Juggling the needs to communicate
the operational reality to stakeholders
alien to the area of work while juggling
hundreds of different paths of production
at the same time was tiring, and made me
want to work in a field where I felt I would
be doing more good than just keeping one
giant multinational from paying a lot of
money to another.
And so I landed in the humanitarian field,
where no skill is more necessary when
dealing with outbreaks and humanitarian
Project Management Institute
SWITZERLAND Chapter
crises than being able to break down the
enormity of the situation into viable tasks
and communicate the reality on the
ground to stakeholders who are often far
removed and with different agendas.
Even within these organizations however,
the work is frequently not seen as project-
based. Often this is because there is no
end in sight for projects like disease era-
dication, and even in a more project
oriented outbreak response, some ele-
ments like disease surveillance, continue
even after the emergency is over.
How do you secure 60 litres of clean
water per Ebola patient per day for
cooking food, drinking and washing
when even the operating theatre in the
5
capital hospital doesn’t have running
water? Your o nly choice is to be a project
manager.
Project management skills are every-
where in humanitarian work. Imagine
working with a country bordering those
affected by the 2014 Ebola outbreak to
prepare for cases within their borders.
From our comfortable place in Switzer-
land, with gleaming hospitals full of highly
trained staff, it’s hard to imagine facing an
outbreak like Ebola in a country short on
trained staff and materials. The infection
control measures needed to protect
healthcare workers that we are so used to
seeing here, like rubber gloves, safety
glasses, surgical masks, are not part of a
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