Negotiation for Project Managers Part 2: Toolkit for Success

 

In the first part of this series on Negotiation and Project Management, we examined how negotiation plays an integral part in almost all project communications. We touched upon how different players in a project team may negotiate to meet different interests. We also discussed how a principled negotiation ("a better way") differed from the typical "tough act" approach.

In this part, we will be stepping deeper and discussing a tool kit that contains five steps that will help enable parties to conduct a principled negotiation.

Five Steps to a Negotiated Outcome

In the following section, we will examine a handful of strategies that would help project managers become better and more successful negotiators. Needless to say, business analysts, systems analysts and technical gurus would all equally benefit from these pointers and perspectives. These steps are based on the famous Harvard negotiation model. The negotiation framework has been described by Roger Fisher and William Ury (and for the second edition, Bruce Patton) in their publication Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).

In this paper, I have used the above framework as a basis to expand and deliberate the principles from a project management perspective, and related it to some of the experiences I have had/heard. I recognize that not all readers may view the …

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