--Originally published at Project Evaluation and Management Reflections
Chapter 17 – Conflict Resolution Lessons
Dr. Larry Boheme, an expert on conflict resolution for systems projects, steps up to teach the management team about conflict resolution. He teaches Mr. T his ‘Win Conditions’ for conflict resolution:
- Accept conflict. Declaring it unacceptable will only drive the conflict underground.
- Complex organizations have diverse goals, which will lead to diverse individual goals which can conflict with each other.
- Conflict is not unprofessional but deserves respect and could be resolved to the organization’s best interests.
- Mediation can represent a simple method of conflict resolution.
- To resolve conflict, the conflicting parties need to understand and respect each other’s needs, keep the organizational goal in mind and look for new options not considered before. Most of the time, common interest exists.
- Procedures for conflict resolution should be put in place before conflict happens. When conflict arises, those procedures can be followed to spot and mediate conflict.
The logic Dr. Larry Boheme follows reminds me of my Project Management class, in which we also discussed how to manage conflict in projects.
We found that first of all, it needs to be determined which kind of conflict we have, as conflict can arise from three categories:
- Different goals & expectations
- Uncertainty about authority
- Interpersonal conflict
Especially in projects, there are some common sources of conflict known to exist in specific phases for which you should expect to arise and look out for. They compromise the following:
- Project formation: lack of clarity, setting of priorities, gaining resources
- Project build-up: problem spill-over from first stage, technical conflicts
- Main part: schedule-related, delays and catching up, trade-offs
- Project phase-out: scheduling, deadlines, personal conflicts
Consequences can include increased costs and wasted resources, decreased productivity and lower motivation, poor decision-making, complaints, blaming or backstabbing. Those are actually
