See What The Experts Say About Handling Conflict In Team Work
The below experiences were shared by Rajesh Bansal and Amr Kassem, the 2 professional and experienced project managers. We would like to say thank you to all the contributors for such valuable insights provided 😄.
Rajesh Bansal
About the interviewee: Rajesh Bansal is a professional project manager with 18 years of experiences in BASIX India and Compusoft Integrated Solutions Inc. (Visit Rajesh’s LinkedIn here).
In fast pace agile deliveries, I have experienced conflicts more as compared to traditional waterfall approach.
In my experience conflict resolution approach has been more individualistic to the conflict. The resolution approach varies based on conflict between who, conflict based on what and conflict based on how.
However, more than often, engaging the persons involved in the conflict has helped to resolve it faster.
For example: There have been cases of conflict between scrum team member and product owner, that were resolved by product demos or engaging them in discussion along with experts.
Conflicts between scrum team members on solutions approach / design were resolved by:
a) involving Product owner in some instances
b) in some instances, enforcing the design documents or solution framework.
Conflict based on results, rewards have been resolved through one to one discussions, sometimes through assertion of power, sometimes through rewards and even sometimes involving third person, has helped in easing the situation
In nutshell, each conflict is unique and is handled uniquely though under some generic guiding principles.
Amr Kassem
About the interviewee: Amr is a professional IT project manager, who started out as a developer (ITWorx INC.), moving on the Business Analysis area (in SunLife Financial and Underwriters Laborities), and finally working in the Project Management area of the industry.
Conflicts are actually quite simple, in my opinion, once you understand where they stem.
By definition, conflicts happen when 2 people are asking for different things and these cannot be completed at the same time.
A classical example, is that the business team is asking for a feature (or a fix) to present to an important client by a certain date (usually very close), while the development team is screaming that the timeline is not realistic.
From my experience, once you apply a critical path methodology to the situation above, and focus on which point exactly is the one that needs to be fixed/enhanced, the solution is actually very simple.
That big client demo where we were going to show them a big new feature can be replaced with screenshots or even static fields on a screen most of the time, just to get by.
Naturally, there needs to be a solid plan behind that, because smoke-and-mirrors can only get you so far.
You need solid deliveries if you intend to keep clients happy any length of time.
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