Managing Politics and Conflict in Projects

Brian Irwin

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781567263848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Managing Politics and Conflict in Projects is an easy-to-read, no-nonsense guide that walks you through the "soft" issues of project management, including communicating, negotiating, and influencing skills that are vital to your project success. Understand your organization's political climate and culture and ascend the corporate ladder to the next level as a project manager. Learn how to deal with political issues requiring complex organizational and interpersonal skills, using valuable review points, tips, and a fictional narrative illustrating the book's main points.
•Improve and develop your leadership, interpersonal, and communications skills
•Negotiate your political environment
•Acknowledge and overcome challenges inherent in project management
•Enhance your career by effectively utilizing politics and conflict
•Recognize and interpret the barriers of communication
•Be prepared to enter into a negotiation
•Overcome cultural challenges

CHAPTER 1

Understanding the
Project Environment

“I ndividual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

Vince Lombardi

To understand the unique challenges inherent in project management, we must first understand the environment in which it takes place. This opening chapter reviews the characteristics of the project management environment and examines some of the challenges it presents. It also introduces some of the complexities related to managing projects in a global business environment.

The Art and Science of Project Management

The PMBOK® Guide defines three distinct characteristics of a project.¹ First, a project is temporary. In contrast to an ongoing operation, a project has a distinct beginning and a distinct end. Second, a project is unique. Its purpose is to create a product, service, or other specific result. Finally, because it is temporary and unique, a project is progressively elaborated—or iteratively refined—until the solution reaches a sufficient level of definition or completeness.

An organization that attempts to undertake projects reaching across functional, cultural, and business boundaries should expect to encounter struggles and complexities. The deciding factor in a project’s success will be how the project manager responds to these challenges.

Crafting a project charter, assembling project schedules, analyzing variances to cost and schedule, and developing risk management plans are all part of the science of project management. Negotiating for project resources (financial and personnel), influencing key stakeholders, and leading the team—those are part of the art of project management. Art and science together define the skill of the successful project manager. Neither can exist without the other if there is to be a successful outcome.

Usually, it’s not the initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing—the science of project management—that causes migraines and heartburn for project managers; rather, it’s the need for constant communication, negotiation, political play, and influence. These skills must be applied in a multidirectional manner—downward to the project manager’s team, upward to the project sponsors, sideways to peers and colleagues, inward to themselves, and outward to external suppliers and partners. The project manager must also keep focused on corporate strategy (forward) and how his or her project fits into it, while simultaneously monitoring and controlling the performance and execution of the project (backward). Figure 1-1 illustrates this concept graphically.

FIGURE 1-1 The Art of Influence through Relationships in Project Management

Challenges in the Project Environment

The project environment offers many challenges for even the most experienced project manager. Four key challenges common to every project environment include: communication, competition for scarce resources, unclear project goals, and lack of power. In recent years, increasing project globalization has presented an additional challenge to project managers around the world.

Communication

Project managers could just as well be titled “project communicators” because they must keep all the project stakeholders engaged and informed during the entire project lifecycle. As a project manager, you can expect to spend up to 90 percent of your time communicating with stakeholders—sponsors, team members, resource managers, vendors, and partners, to name just a few. (In Chapter 4 we’ll take a closer look at stakeholders and their specific interests and influences.)

TIP: Provide a weekly status to the project sponsor even if it hasn’t been asked for. This will give you an opportunity to build a relationship and serve to keep your sponsor actively engaged in the project.

What makes project communication so challenging? First, not all stakeholders need the same information. Second, not all stakeholders need, or want, the communication to be in the same medium (e.g., email, phone, meetings, presentations). The message will also differ with the type of information being communicated (e.g., status reports, schedule changes, scope changes, meeting minutes), as well as the frequency of those communications.

Competition for Scarce Resources

Competition for valuable and scarce resources is another challenge for the project manager. Effectively dealing with this challenge requires that you understand the technical skills critical to each task within your project and that you effectively negotiate with resource managers to have the appropriate person(s) assigned to those tasks.

In many industries, especially in information technology (IT), portfolio management is becoming a popular way to deal with these issues. Portfolio management enables an organization to apply its resources across the board to all of its programs and projects in ways that optimize their use.

Portfolio Management

The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines portfolio management as “a collection of projects (temporary endeavors undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result) and/or programs (a group of related projects managed in a coordinated way to obtain benefits and control not available from managing them individually) and other work that are grouped together to facilitate the effective management of that work to meet strategic business objectives.”² In other words, portfolio management helps organizations ensure that valuable resources are effectively prioritized across several endeavors.

Political savvy is very important to project managers working in a portfolio management environment. Consider the project manager working on one of the low-priority projects in the portfolio. He or she may continuously struggle to keep resources as the needs of high-priority projects shift.

Unclear Project Goals

If you do not know where you are going, you will not know when you get there. Many projects are challenged from the beginning because the sponsor has not provided clear objectives and well-defined goals. What does success look like to the project’s sponsor, its customer, and members of your project team? What are the goals of the project?

The Project Management Institute’s PMBOK® Guide describes projects as temporary and unique.³ That means there must be a specific reason for the project and there must be a distinct beginning and end to the work. But in many instances, the project manager will be handed a project without a clear definition of its scope, even though the project schedule and budget have both been set. Virtually every project manager can identify with the scenario of having a mandated budget and schedule. How can you possibly manage to a dictated schedule and budget without a solid definition of the project’s ultimate goal?

By working to define the goals of the project, you can help the project sponsor define the project’s scope and outcome. Keep in mind that as the project manager, your job is to communicate the work that can be done within the bounds of the directed schedule and budget. If you do not, you’ve essentially accepted the task as directed and have set your project up for failure prior to kickoff. In today’s business environment, cost and schedule are paramount for corporate executives. As companies strive to beat the competition to market, deadlines for development and testing are shrinking and budgets are being cut to increase profit margins.

It’s easy to see why a project manager must have well-honed interpersonal skills. It’s not easy—without jeopardizing your career—to communicate the impacts of unrealistic project schedules and budgets to corporate executives, who are in turn under immense pressure from shareholders and corporate boards. To be successful, the project manager must understand the political environment of the organization and how to communicate effectively at all of its levels.

Lack of Power

In many organizations, the project manager operates without formal positional power over project team members. Team members may be connected to a project manager on paper, but still report to a functional manager who is responsible for their performance reviews and raises. This creates a situation that can easily lead to conflict and struggle. The project manager is placed in a position of assigning project tasks to team members who do not report to him or her.

Figure 1-2 provides a summary of the three major types of organizational structures. Refer to Appendix A for a detailed discussion of each organizational structure, including the advantages and disadvantages of each.

If departmental goals are in conflict with the project, a team member’s priority may be to align with the situation of the moment, which may not be that of the project. For example, consider a matrix organization in which team members report to a functional manager but are assigned to projects individually. These team members may have goals that are aligned with their functional manager’s goals instead of their project manager’s goals.

FIGURE 1-2 Three Major Organizational Structures

TIP: Offer to provide performance feedback to the functional manager of project team members. Doing so will allow you to leverage some of the functional manager’s formal authority over team members performing your project tasks.

Alternatively, consider a projectized organization, in which the team member is assigned to, and reports to, the project manager full-time. The goals of the team member will most definitely map to the project’s goals. Formal power is much more apparent in the projectized structure than it is in the matrix structure.

The project manager must be in constant communication with resource managers to understand where their project falls on the priority scale, because resource managers assign personnel and other resources to their projects. If you sense your project is not a high priority on the resource manager’s list, consider this a risk to your project, proactively manage it, and make contingency plans. If appropriate, elevate the situation to the project sponsor for assistance and guidance.

Project Globalization

Spurred by new technology, corporate mergers and acquisitions, and international joint ventures, business is becoming more global in nature. The globalization of business is in turn leading to the globalization of project management. For the project manager, an international project adds another level of complexity on top of an already complex project environment and necessitates increased cultural and interpersonal awareness.

Project managers should consider several factors when undertaking a global project. The first requisite is to understand the culture of the country (or countries) in which your project is undertaken. This is of vital importance because, for example, courtesies extended in one culture may be viewed as insults in another. Effective project management—both domestically and internationally—of course requires that you not insult your partners, suppliers, customers, subcontractors, or sponsors. But the chance for a misstep is much greater when you’re dealing with stakeholders from other countries and cultures.

TIP: One of the best non-technical global management books I’ve found to help understand the protocols and negotiating strategies of other countri...