Resolving Conflicts by Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry

Conflict is an inevitable part of a project manager’s life. Many project managers are familiar with the saying: “It’s not what happens, it’s how you deal with it.” This paper provides practical approaches to preventing conflicts from escalating and constructively resolving the disagreements between project managers and their team members or stakeholders.

Project management requires many decisions: what to do next, which resources to add or remove, and how to assess a project’s process. Project management provides many tools that can help a project manager with these decisions, but even the most experienced project manager will encounter situations in which his or her decision differs from that of a project team member or stakeholder.

One  common scenario is when the project manager and project team member disagree about the project schedule. In this example, at some time in the past, the project manager consulted with the project team member about the time required for certain tasks. The project manager used this input when developing the schedule for the project, but when it was time to perform his task, the project team member (who happens to be a subject matter expert [SME] in his particular area) insisted that it would take more time to do the task. A second common example is when the project manager and an …