In a negotiation, you create value and “expand the pie” by trading what is of little value to you for what has great value to your negotiating partners, and vice versa. The more goals that each party had indentified, the easier it is to create value in a negotiation.
Be sure not to limit yourselves to one goal. You want to avoid leaving value on the table by not recognizing opportunities to create value. › Continue reading…
Is this a familiar sounding scenario? You rush through the planning phase trying to get to the answer of “when will the work be finished?”. You throw a schedule together with meticulous detail to determine that all important date, then promptly never look at it again. Or, you lay out the schedule according to the different teams that will be working on the project, or according to the different work life cycles, or some other scheme you think easy to update. Then when you take your project schedule into a meeting with executive stakeholders to report on status, › Continue reading…
In my last blog, I talked about the difference between Positions (WHAT I want) and Interests (WHY I want what I want). Understanding the difference is critical for successful negotiations. Negotiators who bargain over interests, which are based on needs, fears, desires and concerns, are more successful than those than bargain over positions. There are often many different ways to satisfy an interest, while attempting to satisfy positions usually does not offer such flexibility. › Continue reading…
One of the most important responsibilities project managers have is communications. Good project managers spend up to 90% of their time communicating. In today’s economic business climate, in order to keep projects or engagements funded, project managers must continually “market” the positive benefits and achievements of projects – even when they are approved. This is certainly true for high profile, publicly funded initiatives where the whims of politics come into play. It is not uncommon in these cases for program managers to become road warriors, traveling to customer sites in order to maintain stakeholder mindshare and keep the project sold. However, even with internal corporate projects, it can be all too easy for executives to decide to cancel them, in order to launch the latest favored initiative, unless they are constantly given good reasons not to. › Continue reading…
As project managers, we spend a lot of our work life engaged in some type of bargaining – for resources, timelines, budgets, and definitions of success. Then we go home and start all over again – who takes the trash out, where we spend the holidays, what constitutes an acceptable math grade! These agreements are usually made by compromise, and often result in no one really being satisfied with the outcome. › Continue reading…