The Project Management Institute estimates that nearly 90% of a project manager's time is spent communicating in some form. This may be sending or receiving project status reports, working with the various project change control boards, or personally meeting with management (or clients) to insure their needs are addressed. Conflict resolution techniques are powerful tools to assist the project manager when dealing with a problem project. This is especially critical when dealing with Business Continuity and/or Disaster Recovery projects.

When dealing with a conflict, your choices are realistically limited. You can hope that the conflict will "just go away" and hope for the best. Another option is to step into the middle of the conflict, make a decision, and move on from there. Unfortunately, this is a poor choice as someone is always the "winner" and someone else is the "loser". If the conflict comes from within your project team, it can be unnecessarily divisive. If the conflict comes from any layer of management (upper or lower), it can eventually become a bigger problem if the "loser" makes a political issue out of it.

A better way of dealing with conflict is to create a "win-win" atmosphere where no one is the "winner" or "loser". One technique is to have all concerned parties document their concerns and try to sort out the best answer through their responses. At some point, you may have to make a decision, but you need to note the dissenting viewpoints as "known risks". This allows everyone to have their viewpoints documented as action items or as risks. You can also have the dissenting viewpoints work on risk mitigation plans in case they prove to be correct.

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