Common Conflicts in the Project Management

Conflict often arises when there is difference of opinions among the parties involved in the project. Project management is complicated because of these conflicts but dealing these conflicts can result in better outcome than expected. As per Francine Richards & Tricia Goss there five types of common conflicts in the project management. Assigning the roles is the primary role of the project manager where some conflicts arises, Team members may not interpret their role properly. It is the responsibility of the project manager to explain the tasks and roles of the team members.

While prioritizing the tasks team members have conflicts over what task is assigned to who.

Teammates might work at the same time on various projects and can’t separate the priority of one project’s task from another, this leads to the confusion and make the deadlines delayed. Different people working from different places in the IT projects, there are fair chances of conflicts among the employees and managers since there is no proper communication between teammates. (Francine Richards & Tricia, 2011). This is the problem we face in our office, we have 10 people working on same project and we all work remotely. Project manager conduct weekly Sprint meetings to prioritize tasks and assign them to the developers, I believe that using Agile methodology can solve this problem. Also there has to be a communication medium between the people for proper communication, thanks to Skype Business, it has solved most of the communication problems. Task dependencies are also one of the reasons for conflicts, conflict occurs when one person unable to finish the task with in the time and another team member is waiting for the first person to get his task done.

There are several advantages of conflicts too. It encourages new thinking among the employees. Difference of opinions give more scope for innovative ideas. Organizational clash typically prompts a series of inquiries for those on the two sides of any issues. Those questions can prompt new thoughts and leaps forward in thinking that can benefit individuals, offices and organizations. (Leigh Richards, 2018). Sometimes conflicts help to meet deadlines faster by giving more room for discussion and new ideas to reduce the time for development. For example when we discuss design documentation that we get from the client, conflicts arises about how to proceed with the design and testing. After several conflicts and debates we decide to go with the parallel testing for our short claims project. By this we have used Unit testing in the UI, which reduced the time for testing in the UAT phase and helped us to reach the deadline 2 months prior to the actual date. This is one of the real time examples where conflicts actually do favor than harm in projects.

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