Effective communication was a vital requirement for the project. In general, we achieved good communication during project visits. In between project visits, however, our communication was not very good.

We used e-mail and video-conferencing to communicate between project visits, but we did not plan this properly so that it was spasmodic and not as effective as it should have been. One of the consequences of this was that we used valuable time on project visits to catch up on basic issues that should have been dealt with by effective communication.

One of the reasons for poor communication between project visits was pressure of work. Project teams found that their commitment to the project was not always recognised by senior management in terms of time release, financial reward etc.

On project visits, we found that the social time during banquet meals, sightseeing etc were really effective in getting to know individual members of the project team.

We also found that during project meetings, we needed to have time out as an individual project team to reflect and summarise on what had happened during the project meetings. The process of joint project meetings is very intense and time-consuming, as time must be allowed for English/Chinese translation.