The purpose of agile localization is to minimize the gap
between your product development and localization processes for the sake of
cutting down costs and enhancing effectiveness. Most of the time project managers
are unable to meet the desired goals. It can happen for many reasons that we'll
be discussing in this article.
In a global enterprise, you've to get away with localization
challenges and deal with the mistakes throughout the localization procedure. In
all this, the role of a project manager is very critical and definitive in the
success of your overall localization project.
Losing Track of Your End Goals
It happens many times that you may lose vision of the
localization project and be distracted from the actual goals. Lack of focus can
lead to major mistakes happening throughout your localization project. It also
reduces the effectiveness of project managers. That's the project managers need
to make the goals and vision of the localization project very clear to the
localization teams.
Be very open to answering your teams' questions to eliminate
all sorts of misunderstandings. If a project manager is neglecting the open
feedback from teams, they are likely to face more conflicts and failures in the
project. So, with budget management, quality assurance, and establishing
communication strategies, a collective mental clarity of your localization
teams is another important aspect to avoid failures and handle your
localization project smoothly.
Lack of Understanding of the Target Market
To effectively go about your localization project, you
should have a detailed understanding of your target market demographics. Unless
you don't fully understand the culture, business environment, and customer
psychologies in the target market, you can't really pull off your localization
project management success.
Before starting your localization project, you need to
conduct comprehensive market research to understand how things work in that
market. Especially, when you are dealing in more than one market without proper
research, it leads to failures and frequent mistakes. There are also some
chances that your final outcomes are not aligned with the actual goals. You can
use a professional cloud based localization management platform while targeting multiple markets
simultaneously.
Insufficient Data
If you want your localization to not go in vain, it is
important to back your decisions with accurate data only. Most project managers
totally rely on assumptions when it comes to making critical localization
decisions. To achieve desirable results, you have to carefully evaluate the
markets, customers, available technologies, and methods to keep things headed
in the right direction from the beginning till the end.
You must not rely on online research journals' data that are
publicly available. For your unique localization product, you need first-hand
data collected to serve your specific product needs only. Through your
customer's interviews and questionnaires, you can get first-hand customer data
and use it to make informed decisions. So, making too many assumptions based on
personal judgments and not using the data can be a major reason behind your
failure to agile localization project management.
Not Investing in Skill Development
It happens most of the time that project managers and teams
get used to the current methods and techniques. They don't want to get out of
their comfort zones to adopt the latest technologies and train themselves to do
things better. If you are not uplifting your team skills and training them to
use the latest tools and technologies, you might not be able to cope with the
changing dynamics of the localization industry.
Traditionalist companies always suffer when it comes to the
adoption of the latest technology. When they don't change with time, they end
up losing control of things and start failing more often. Project managers need
to take the initiatives to train their teams in using a cloud based translation management system
and introduce new localization management methods to them to get a competitive
edge and stay relevant with new landscapes of industry.
check out: https://www.marshub.com/how-to-tap-into-the-japanese-market-a-localization-guide/
Not Taking Responsibility and Blaming Others
Being a project manager, you have to be mindful of
your responsibilities. At the end of the day, you are the only one accountable
for all failures and mistakes. Blaming each other or putting everything on the
team will not do any good to your localization project. That's why you should
have a progressive approach to managing and viewing things. You must take
complete responsibility for your localization project and teams.
It'll not just help you get out of that toxic blaming
culture but allow you to improve the problematic area. There is no one person
to put blame on one when a project fails; it is a collective responsibility. So,
focus on learning from failure and embrace it to do things better in the
future.
