Project Management and Conflict

Cheik,

first be clear about your own position: as a PM your first loyalty is to the sponsor, he signed the charter and authorized you to implement the project. He should be aware about the impact of this conflict on his project, you should analyse and show him.

Second, now your leadership and influencing capabilities become key. What kind of power and political influence do you have on sponsor and on the key stakeholders? It determines if you are even the right person to facilitate. For conflicts it is important to remove negative emotions on both sides before trying to argue about the problem.

Third, this is a typical problem for a PM, you will learn a lot. Try to maintain your integrity.

it is a general and wide question. It is hard to say. You may need to apply different conflict resolution approaches and tools.

Cheikh -

As usual, it depends on the context of the conflict and the impacts to the project resulting from it.

If you believe that you can successfully act as a facilitator to work through the conflict without being perceived as having a bias towards either the sponsor or some other key stakeholder, you could do so. For example, if the conflict is not about the project's outcomes but rather about how those outcomes will be achieved (e.g. solution, resources, costs), you might be able to use a problem-solving/confront approach to work through the issue. On the other hand, if key stakeholders are against the project, you have a more fundamental challenge which might require re-evaluating the rationale for the project itself.

Like I said "it depends"!

Kiron