12 Tips for Negotiating With Neighboring Teams

Dmitriy is an agile coach and project manager in Moscow.

  Communications Management   CRM   Stakeholder Management  

To successfully manage a project, your team often needs help from another team or department. It could be something like the development of a feature, the setting up of equipment, the granting of access levels, or the approval of a document.

But what happens if you didn’t think ahead and all of the plans for the month (or quarter, or whatever crucial time period you are working with) have already been approved? This is a harsh reminder that planning is not easy!

What are you going to do? Communication is at the heart of the solution. Here are some possible tactics to get out of this bind…

1. Ruthlessly decompose. Identify what is independent and what you can do with your own forces. We can try again ourselves by highlighting the MVP (minimum viable product). Look for an acceptable smaller result that could still be valuable from the user's perspective (to reach conclusions/learnings; to reduce technical, managerial, and other risks). Arrange this with the whole team.

2. Ask again, politely. Come to a friendly agreement. Make eyes like Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies, melting the heart of your co-worker as you ask: "Please! Do this task for us next week."

Jokes aside, sometimes sincere and polite “extra” requests work.

"I would take two leads and initiate a discussion: ‘Okay, stuff happened. How did you …

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