Effective negotiating is critical to successful collaboration. All it takes is one key problem to explode to convert a sense of “we” into “us versus them.” At the same time, negotiating is pervasive through all aspects of project management work. Successful Negotiating – Requirements Project managers must negotiate support and funding from top management. They…
Category: Project Management
Negotiation – 4 Key Points To Increase Your Effectiveness
The introduction to the art of negotiation can be found here. I encourage you to read that first to get the an introduction to the topic and then come back to this article. I have provided links between the two for easy navigation. Negotiation Framework Fisher and Ury from the Harvard Negotiation Project champion an…
Outsourcing Project Work: Why, How, When?
…being a good partner has become a key corporate asset. I call it a company’s collaborative advantage. In the global economy, a well developed ability to create and sustain fruitful collaborations gives companies a significant competitive leg up.—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor It is rare in today’s flat world to find important projects…
Outsourcing Project Work – 7 Best Practices
This is the second part of a short guide on outsourcing. If you have landed on this article via a Google/Bing search then I encourage you to take a look at this article first and then follow the links to read the entire guide. This article describes some of the best practices I have observed…
Outsourcing Project Work – 4 Advantages and Disadvantages
This is the first part of a short guide on outsourcing. If you have landed on this article via a Google/Bing search then I encourage you to take a look at this article first and then come back to this one. Outsourcing Overview The term outsourcing has traditionally been applied to the transferring of business…
7 Easy Ways You Can Rejuvenate Your Project Team
Over the course of a long project, a team sometimes drifts off course and loses momentum. The project manager needs to swing into action to realign the project team with the project objectives and step on the pedal. What options are there for the project team? There are both formal and informal solutions. Informal actions:…
Virtual Project Team: Challenges, Solutions, Success
Building a high-performance project team among a mixture of part-time and full-time members is a challenging task. Consider how much more challenging it is to build a team when members cannot engage in face-to-face interactions. Such would be the case for a virtual project team in which the team members are geographically situated so that…
Managing Conflicts Within the Project
Disagreements and conflicts naturally emerge within a project team during the life of the project. Participants will disagree over priorities, allocation of resources the quality of specific work, solutions to discovered problems, and so forth. Some conflicts support the goals of the group and improve project performance. Effectively managing conflicts within the project is critical…
Do You Encourage Functional Conflict?
The demarcation between functional conflict and dysfunctional conflict is neither clear nor precise. In one team, members may exchange a diatribe of four-letter expletives and eventually resolve their differences. Yet in another project team, such behavior would create irreconcilable divisions and would prohibit the parties from ever working together productively again. The distinguishing criterion is…
Manage Dysfunctional Conflict Easily Using This 5 Step Framework
Managing dysfunctional conflict is a much more challenging task than encouraging functional conflict. First, dysfunctional conflict is hard to identify. A manager might have two highly talented professionals who hate each others guts, but in the heat of competition they produce meritorious results. Is this a pleasant situation? No. Is it functional? Yes, as long…