NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES 1

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES 1

Managing Conflict Within Project Teams _______________________________________________

Introduction

Dave Dunbar knew that some of his days as a project manager would be

challenging, but he suddenly found himself in a situation more difficult than any

other he had encountered before.

Dave was managing the Icarus project, which was intended to provide the major

business unit in the Acme Corporation with a state-of-the-art database system for

its critical business processes. The project was high-profile, and the team had

already encountered more than its share of obstacles to progress. The project was

running about two weeks behind schedule. The team was doing its best to make up

for lost time, but a nasty dispute between two factions within the project team had

emerged.

Late in the previous week, Allison Keyes, the project’s software architect, had

stormed into Dave’s cubicle. “We’ve been running a number of performance tests

on the application on what will be the production environment, and I’m not happy

with the results. We’re seeing unpredictable spikes in the amount of time it takes

for the database to return queries. We can’t allow for this kind of performance when

the application goes live – the users will be furious!”

Dave asked Allison what she thought the problem might be. She grimaced and

responded by saying “It has to be the way all of the servers and the network have

been set up. The hardware team put it together in a way I’ve never seen before.”

After talking with Allison, Dave followed up with Danny Kim, who was in charge of

the hardware and networking environment. Danny shook his head vigorously when

Dave related Allison’s comment. “That’s ridiculous!”, he had exclaimed. “There’s no

way the hardware would have the effect she’s reporting. We’re using a state-of-the-

art configuration, including fiber optics and advanced storage area network

technology. The diagnostics we’ve been running on a regular basis show everything

is working perfectly. It has to be a problem with the application itself or the

database.”

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES 2

Dave felt that he was caught in the middle of a pitched battle. He relied on his

technology experts to provide solutions. What could he do when they couldn’t come

up with an answer?

Project Background

The Acme Corporation was a large, diversified manufacturer and distributor to a

variety of industries. Although it served a lot of different types of businesses, it had

decided years ago to leverage third party vendors wherever possible to handle its

information technology needs. That allowed Acme to minimize the number of full-

time employees in its information technology services division. The company

believed it needed to employ its own project managers to oversee technology

projects and leveraged a stable of experienced project managers as needed. Acme

applied a matrix approach to its organization. Projects such as Icarus which

involved staff from multiple departments and outside vendors were managed by

full-time project managers who did not have direct managerial authority over

project resources. The project managers collaborated with the functional managers

involved to orchestrate work effort and make decisions.

Dave had been assigned to the Icarus project based on his success in similar

projects in the past. He started out as a software developer, and later moved into

project management about five years into his career. He understood software and

hardware architecture at a high level but was by no means an expert. His role was

to steer the project to a successful conclusion, but he had to rely on the expertise

of internal staff and external vendor resources.

The Icarus project had employed two separate technology vendors to work on the

project. One vendor, BBT Inc., had been chosen to set up and maintain the

computing environment specifically created for the new system. The other, a

software development company called SymTech, had been employed to furnish the

team of developers and other experts to design and implement the database and

the software.

Danny Kim, the infrastructure manager responsible for creating and maintaining the

hardware environment while the new application was being built, was an employee

of BBT. Allison Keyes, on the other hand, worked for SymTech. Originally, SymTech

had bid to have control over the entire project, but Acme’s technology division had

successfully worked with BBT so often in the past that it was considered the vendor

of choice for setting up server environments and networks.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES 3

Allison and Danny had seemed to develop a working relationship at the outset of

the project, but there had been indications of disagreements leading up to this

most recent event. Dave was used to seeing different technology experts have

different ideas and opinions and had not been concerned when his two technology

leads expressed themselves. He believed the project would ultimately benefit from

their combined expertise. Now, he had to figure out a way to make that happen.

Managing the Conflict

Dave decided to address this issue during the next meeting of the Icarus

technology team. In addition to Dave, Allison and Danny, the team consisted of:

• Esteban Cruz, the quality assurance manager responsible for testing the

application

• Naomi DiMaggio, an Acme operations manager whose staff was expected to

be the chief users of the new application

• Sam Saunders, the information security expert assigned to ensure the new

system complied with Acme’s security policies.

Dave put the performance issue at the top of the leadership team meeting agenda.

After the usual brief introductions, he began to speak.

Dave: I appreciate everyone making it here on time. We’ll start by

discussing the application performance issue Allison raised. A brief

description of the problem is included in the agenda. We’ll dedicate today’s

meeting to this issue and see if we can brainstorm some ways to solve it.

Esteban: Dave, I apologize for not talking to you about this before the

meeting, but I’m wondering if this problem is really worth the effort to talk

about right now. Couldn’t we talk about this after my team has had a chance

to run its own tests?

Allison: I’m not comfortable doing that, Esteban. We’re just delaying the

inevitable, and I think that will cause us even more headaches a month or

two from now. I don’t think we really have much to talk about. It’s clear to

me that the servers all need to be reconfigured.

Danny: Hold on a second! The current configuration is not responsible for

the issues you reported. I can swear to that. What we really need to do here

is review the database design. That’s where the trouble is!

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES 4

The next five minutes of the meeting reminded Dave of an intense tennis match in

which the opposing players volleyed the ball furiously back and forth to one

another. He had to step in a couple of times to remind Allison and Danny to calm

down. After they had each exhausted themselves describing their technical

arguments, they sat glaring across the conference table at one another. Dave took

a minute to summarize their points for the entire team, then Naomi spoke for the

first time.

Naomi: Why don’t we just try to address each of the causes Allison and

Danny identified? We might even flip a coin to decide which one to try first.

That might be faster than continuing this debate!

Sam: Are there any other possible reasons which you both think are causing

the problem? If so, why don’t we just try fixing those first?

These comments led to another three minutes of back-and-forth comments by

Danny and Allison. Dave did his best to serve as the referee for the discussion, but

again felt like he was watching a tennis match. Neither Danny nor Allison yielded

their positions. While the team earnestly wanted to leave the meeting with some

next steps defined, no one knew how to defuse the conflict.

After the meeting, Dave took refuge in his cubicle and shook his head ruefully. “So

much for Round 1!” he thought to himself. “What should I try next?”

Discussion Items 1. PMBOK identifies five conflict resolution techniques:

a. Collaborate / Problem Solve

b. Force / Direct

c. Compromise / Reconcile

d. Smooth / Accommodate

e. Withdraw / Avoid

Can you classify the techniques tried by the different participants in the

meeting according to the ones shown above?

2. Can you suggest any steps Dave might have taken to prevent this situation

from happening in the first place?

3. What advice would you offer Dave to try to resolve this conflict?