Project manager is in the center of all the conflicts during project execution, when the project roles cannot get what he wants from the previous output. All the activities in the projects have the possibility to migrate onto the critical path, transfer that will put quite serious negative impact on the project scope, such as budget, time, cost and quality.

         PM is the conflict manager when any team member will reach PM for help or complaint. In this situation, PM will negotiate with the responsible of the output that dissatisfies the one who reach PM for help. Some tips for the PM to take the reference.

         PM should:

1)       Evaluate the impact of the conflict.

2)       Clear on the goals of this talk and bottom line.

3)       Use “we should…”, rather than “could you pls…”.

4)       Never compromise without drawback. That is, both should make compromise

However, the best power of PM is that he should review the activities that will start in the next coming period and considering all the inputs to avoid the conflicts. Even if, sometimes, company and managers focus on the firefighters, a good PM can manage the conflict advance, action that sounds similar to risk management.

Let us take a case for instance.

Y is a new project, which will produce a customized product for an operator. One day, the SQE found an issue that the product cannot compatible with the consumer products. It is a very serious problem that will delay the project timeline and affect the business finally.

When we looked back to the root cause of this issue, we found that it was the ID designer does not have the early prototype to do some compatible test with the products that the consumer daily use.

But the urgent issue is that we should solve this issue and, unavoidable, the timeline for the system prototype build and internal type approval was delayed for around 3wks. In this situation, the PM has to talk to TA to compact the time plan for the type approval. And at the same time, organize the mechanical designer to find the solution to meet all the consumer products.

         This is a typical conflict scenario during the project execution.

         Basically, anyone does not like the planned activities to be affected by the inputs that he needs. But, when he is in the conflict, he should have to make compromise based on the organization of the PM.

However, there is another fact that all the roles are pushing the project to success. So, the PM should take a meeting with all the team members to clarify the situations to all the team members and collect the impact based on this situation.