Conflict Management, to Negotiate and Resolve Them

Working as a Program manager, not only do we need to acquire the skills and knowledgeof managing projects, strategy alignments and understanding of financial analysis/reports, we must acquire the ability to negotiate and salve kind of difficult situations to maintain a win-win settlement between ourselves and the parties involved.

The relationship with the Customer is long-term and along the path problems may boil to surface from time to time.  There are ways to manage them and herewith are the negotiation styles tha can be used:

1. Problem Solving – engaging both parties to try to find solutions that work best for each other.
2. Compromise – a situation where both parties give in more or less regardless on how that will meet their needs.
3. Agression – only one party forces concession from the other side.

When the negotiations gets aggressive, and involves threats and demands this will affect the relationship with the Customer.   As such, we need to resolve the conflicts.  The ways we can do to cool down the conflicts when facing the aggressiveness are:

• Calm ourselves down.
• Show them our willingness to work things out by talking about the issue rather then escalating it with more agressions.
• State our point of view in a neutral tone than in an argumentive tone.
• Try ways to resolve the dispute, and working together to find the solution that both sides can embrace/accept.

The above are strategized for win-win solutins for both parties.  It is not that simple to execute the above as it requires oneself to build the competence of self-awareness, self-confidence, self-control and empathy.

Agile Method for WMS solutioning – Dynamics System Development Method

With only the fixed time frame to achieve the required scopes for the project, we have to adapt a software development methodology, probably apply one of the “Agile Methods” to focus to deliver the WMS solution quickly and efficiently.  The one I am looking to adapt is DSDM (Dynamic System Development Method).

Why will I choose DSDM as my project’s software development methods?  A few points have been considered to adapt this method to the team:

1. The solution has to delivered on time and on budget.
2. The core functions (as based on the business requirements)have to be delivered quickly and the future features will be delivered in a regular/iterative intervals.

The activities to be planned to work towards the delivery of the solution, we have to decide and work out the plan on:

• High-level business requirements are defined before going into the details during the course of the development
• What functions we can consider for iterative releases based on user feedbacks.
• Decision-makings have to be made rapidly through the team members instead of going through any management processes/red-tapes to get approved.
• We have to consider to meet the business needs rather on the technical perfection or good product quality.
• Collaboration and cooperation with internal users and Customers must be actively involved to ensure the success of the project.

Implementation Design for a Regional WMS Solution

We were discussing with our solution team about the implemenation design for the regional WMS (warehouse management system) .  With the tight timeline to achieve and without any confirmed system design to work on, the Management agreed to go forward with a localised platform (stand-alone, single instance) and using this solution to deploy to other sites that may needs double-bytes/UTF-8 encoding.

We have reviewed the possibility to move forward to a centralised solution,  and to host in a site centrally accessible by the countries.  The contraints we have identified what we need to do to see if it is feasible to do centralised solution.

Points taken for considering a Centralized Solution:

• The cost of purchasing the WMS application’s software license
• The support structure, change management and SLA (service level agreement.
• Multi-language support example to support UTF-8 encoding/double bytes characters.
• Interfacing with local systems (country-specific)
• Network performance
• Inclusion of data manipulation from the web service
• Centralised Hosting of the application server, database server, web server and possible RF (radio frequency) application at one site.

Implement Extreme Programming for Warehouse Management System

Before we kick-off this intensive 3 months’ development to come up with a full WMS (warehouse management system), we need to set up ground rules and expectations from each project team member so that we are on track and cannot afford any delay in communications.

Extreme Programming’s Principles:

• Set weekly milestones on what are the modules/stages of the application is to be completed.
• Every project team member must communicate and work together daily throughout the project.
• The measure of project progress is to work towards a working software.
• A face-to-face or phone conversation is to be established as to maintain the best effective method on conveying information among team members.
• Keep things simple as to maximize the amount of work done.
• Provides support and the environment they need and trust them to get things done.
• Continuous attention towards good software and technical design.

Fast-tracking the development work with additional resources

Full-fletch solution to be completed in 3 months.  Unrealistic but this is what we promised to deliver for the Customer to save the business.  We have analysed and it is not possible to do iterative development as this is a new, full-fetched system and it has to be delivered as a complete package.

Lots of the activities  are to do in parallel with the development work, possibly the test cases, test data, training etc.  I am worried with the one month’s testing (both SIT and UAT) to be done in the whole month of December.  Project team members have to work overtime and not sure how much resources we need to cover some of the project activities.

The difficult portion of the development is how to spilt the modules to the assigned 6 resources to do the development work and importantly to define the roles and responsiblities for each of the project team member assigned so that we can quickly resolve any disputes on the resources’ skillsets and expectations.

Next I have to review the project cost for the additional inshore and offsource resources, not to mention the travel cost as well for the lodgings and any allowances that the resources may need to claim when they are to reside in Australia for 2 to 3 months period for the project.

The biggest risk of all is that we do not have enough time to do comprehensive testings of all the modules and we are at the big risk that we may experience unforseen system issues when we cutover the new system in early January 2010.  Everyone wants to rush and get the system out on time but we need to do testing to ensure we are able to deliver quality solution to the Customer.  If we do not do well, this will bring more dissatisfaction for the Customer but the Management is aware and we all have agreed that this is the risk we need to take.  But they do not understand the pressure and stress this have put outfront to my project team members and this is very unhealthy.

Counting down, 4 months to complete all planned project activities and this is another project failure I am working towards to.