Conflicts in Project Management

Just like Kerzner mentions in his book, Kerzner’s Project Management, conflicts are a way of life in a project. You cannot make a project without having at least one conflict, which normally is something to do either with the project’s objectives or with the team itself. Since there is no way to guarantee there will be no problems with something, there are at least a few ways to minimize them.

Projects are hard to do in groups because of sharing the objectives. Objectives should be very specific but not complex. Something that can be realistic and attainable within the time, cost, and resources but must also be somewhat challenging or there is no real point in doing the project. Another way of saying this is objectives must be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and tangible.

Back when I was learning programming, some in the class decided to make a few chat programs, since we thought it would be hard to do to test ourselves and see who’s was better. We started off by making one program that saves a message to a file and another program that reads what is in the file, which worked as the chat program. A problem we had was we did not define what the chat program’s objectives should have been, like what it should look like. What everyone really wanted was a program like google chat, where it was one program that did both the reading and writing to a file at the same time. They also wanted it to work over the internet so when someone was not in class, they could still talk to us. None of us had the specifics so we all did our own thing which was making two programs instead of just one. We also just learned about using files but never about doing things over the internet, so it was impossible for us to do anything with that. The project we wanted to do was not specific and not realistic.

Another thing that was talked about in the book was solving team conflicts. Thankfully I did not have any real conflicts from working with a project manager. I have done a few projects that did not work out the way the employer wanted but they were always small problems he did not really care about. After reading about how to handle those types of conflicts, I feel confident I could fix them when they do happen. Some of those ways included confronting, compromising, accommodating, forcing, and avoiding the other party or problem. Confronting is when they try to work through their disagreement to solve it. Compromising is to bargain so you both get something out of it, which was describe as a “win-win” or “lose-lose” situation. Accommodating is describe as attempting to reduce the emotions that exist in a conflict, which does not resolve the conflict but helps say there is a solution. Two other ways to handle conflicts, which I found amusing, are to force and avoid. Force is to impose the solution on the other party and avoiding is known as a temporary solution to a problem. The reason I found them amusing is the way the books describes when to use them, with forcing is when you are stronger, since you never start a battle you cannot win and when you know you are right. It sounds like what you expect from a story about a battlefield and not a group working on a project together, and the fact that you might not know that you are right so how can you tell if you force the other side? The avoiding method is said to be used when you think the problem will go away, but from my experiences, problems never go away fully, they just become less of a problem over time or you think they went away until they show back up a lot worse than before.

I do not know if I agree with all the ways to resolve a conflict mentioned in the book, but I am still learning so my view might change in time. There is still a lot to know to lower the risk of having conflicts which I can only hope I learn from books and not from failing a project, which is why I keep on learning.