Conflict is a natural part of life and is inevitable working on a project with a team full of people who all have different ideas on how things are going to be done. Anything a project is being worked on, conflicts should be planned for and be addressed on how they will be handled so everyone has the same expectations on what the process is to resolve them. Unfortunately conflict with external teams and people are not always so easily addressed since the project manager of one team does not have influence with a different project’s team, but these issues can still be addressed.
In the Tent City case study the team is suffering from a lack of internal communication and were actually receiving more information from news outlets telling the story instead of it being passed around within teams. Interdepartmental communication can cause a lot of conflict between teams, the department that is not receiving the communication becomes frustrated that they are being left out of the loop and then cannot assist customers when they call regarding the information the department did not received. Other departments may then become upset with them because they are not following the information that was sent around unaware that they did not receive it. As a project manager I would refer back to the project charter’s communication plan to see about resolving the issue. If done properly, the communication plan should explain where this information should be coming from, who is responsible for getting the information and sending it out to the team. If this is not outlined in the project charter’s communication plan then an updated charter would be drafted to include a communication plan which assigns the task of receiving and distributing communications to the team. This is an example of process conflict.
Another conflict the team may face is conflict between several team