This article contains another excerpt from Paul Tinnirello’s book “New Directions in Project Management.” This is the fifth installment in a six-part series entitled Balancing Critical Project Success Factors. In case you’ve missed the first four, here’s what we’ve covered so far:
In this fifth segment we cover engaging conflicts directly and resolving them efficiently and effectively.
Engage Conflicts Directly and Resolve Conflicts Efficiently and Effectively
Once project plans are underway, change happens. Requirements shift, the client does not meet its obligations in the project plan, and budgets can be reduced. Changes within the IT group can also occur. Tasks may exceed initial estimates. Key programmers leave to join other firms. Differences in opinion among IT professionals about the best approach can erupt into conflicts that push projects off track.
When this happens, IT professionals must assertively engage key stakeholders (e.g., users, user management, IT management) in problem solving about the trade-offs that must be made in quality, time, cost, and perhaps even customer service agreements. Assertiveness is critical because users (and admittedly IT management on occasion) would prefer to avoid making necessary but difficult decisions about trade-offs between quality, time, and cost. Interestingly, resolving such conflicts may be best viewed as a typical and not unusual part of what IT project managers do. In survey research of professional project managers, it was discovered that they report spending an average of 12 hours per week resolving conflicts.
When engaged in problem solving about trade-offs, stakeholders sometimes become frustrated and retaliate by challenging the competence or creativity of the IT project manager. IT professionals sometimes respond to such challenges by retreating from their legitimate interests. In a misguided effort to please, some over-commit to all three factors although significant changes in the project environment necessitate adjustments. The result is priority overload, stressed-out IT personnel, a loss of credibility and influence, suboptimal IT work products, or missed timelines.
Assertively championing one’s basic interests, exploring alternatives with affected parties even when they are not enthusiastic to do so, and collaborating to construct win-win agreements is the better response. Unfortunately, many people drawn to information technology (like many drawn to other technical disciplines) have a personal aversion to conflict. Consequently, for some IT professionals, enhanced negotiation skills is necessary.
Faithfully applying project management disciplines can limit the amount and scope of project conflicts that IT professionals have to manage. Conducting risk assessments early in the project life cycle to identify factors that might threaten project deliverables is one such discipline. If a risk is detected early (e.g., weak user management consensus on requirements) and focused problem solving occurs about what contingencies are necessary to address it (e.g., identifying a resource that can be used to do team conflict resolution with user managers), project disruptions caused by the risk can be effectively contained.
Providing regular user management updates is a second project management discipline. When updates work most effectively, not only is progress reported, but threats to project deliverables are reviewed and user management support of efforts to limit or resolve those threats is secured.
For some complex projects, more substantial organizational conflict management mechanisms are required. On large IT initiatives, the relative priority of the needs of different user groups can change over time. Because IT resources are often relatively fixed, reallocating resources to respond to a increased urgency for one user often means reneging on commitments made to other users. To address shifting priorities between users, some IT groups convene regular, periodic meetings of steering committees or users councils. When such mechanisms work well, users collectively learn about urgent priority changes, explore alternative responses to these situations, and finally make mutual decisions about priority changes and IT resource reallocation. In these settings, IT professionals facilitate the preparation of information that enables these groups to make sound decisions. By promoting quality dialogue between users, IT professionals enhance organizational problem solving.
Paul C. Tinnirello is the editor of “New Directions in Project Management” from the Best Practices Series.