Negotiation is a process of interaction among parties who have differing, conflicting, or competing goals but want to seek a solution agreeable to all. Because real-world problem solving often involves seeking trade-offs and reconciliation among competing interests, negotiation is a critical problem-solving skill.
To start, I would like to offer two suggestions that you can use to help facilitate your next negotiation:
- Explore what is motivating others (context) before you react to their request or proposal.
- Use the "Iron Triangle" of project management as a problem solving aid.
Humans engage in primitive negotiation from the moment they can communicate. A crying baby "negotiates" with its parents for food, a clean diaper, or attention. Siblings negotiate with one another when they trade Halloween candy, trying to maximize the number and variety of their favorite tasty treats. Married couples negotiate how household chores will be allocated between them. Yet people often fail to develop their negotiating skills beyond a basic level. Primitive negotiators think of negotiation in terms of win and lose, of dominance and surrender. This primitive view can make negotiating an emotionally charged process often avoided when possible.
To constructively engage in negotiation, it is helpful to think of it as a collaborative process. The goal isn't "winning" but to find an agreeable solution that accommodates everyone's needs. From a project perspective, this quest can be partitioned into two parts: understanding the contexts of the negotiating parties and searching the solution space for agreeable alternatives.
What They Want
To negotiate effectively, you must understand who wants what and why they want it. In my experience, people often focus on the demands or requests of other parties without understanding their motivation. If you find yourself guessing why someone wants what he wants, you have probably gotten ahead of yourself. If you find yourself arguing that a request is unreasonable before you know why it was made, you may end up embarrassing yourself.
To explain this point, negotiators tell the story of two children arguing over which should have the last four lemons in the house, each insisting that they need all four for their purposes. The first solution that comes to many people is that each child should get two lemons, which seems fair though it disappoints everyone involved. Exploring the situation further might determine that one child wants the lemons for juice to make lemonade, while the other child wants the rind for a baking recipe. It might be possible to completely satisfy both parties once you understand the context of their requests.
Establishing a context for project requests is important as well. Imagine one of your sponsoring executives is away at a trade conference and calls to ask whether you can accelerate your project ship date from October 1 to September 1. Before you begin arguing that the schedule is already tight, it will serve you to ask what he or she had in mind. Some possible motivations:
- The executive just had coffee with a potential new client who would buy a jillion copies of your product if it were available by September 1.
- The executive just overheard a competitor discussing the September availability date of a comparable product.
- The executive just found out that venture capitalists expressed concerns about your company's ability to deliver. The next meeting with the Venture Capital firm is September 15.
- The executive was intrigued by a trade show booth presentation he just saw and was imagining your product being similarly demonstrated at a trade show scheduled for mid-September.
- The executive was updating his "accomplishments for the second quarter" slide for the big boss and realized that there weren't many visible achievements scheduled for the third quarter. Shipping your product in the third quarter was one of several possibilities.
- The executive was wondering if you had inflated your schedule and figured it couldn't hurt to ask if you could pull it in.
Your response to the request will be more effective if you know the other person's motivation. If a request is driven by a pressing business need, pushing back may be a waste of time, but blindly agreeing to the request may be just as bad. The real question is: can you find a way to satisfy the schedule goals with a useful product and the resources available?
Problem Solving with the Iron Triangle
Project negotiations often involve competing pressures among the three triangle sides of project definition and performance:
- Scope--What is desired (features, functions, quality, performance, and compliance with constraints)
- Schedule--When a work product is desired
- Resources--The people, equipment, facilities, and materials needed to do the work
Change in one project element often requires accommodation in the others. This fact can help with project-related problem solving by suggesting where to look for relief.
Let's take a few of the possible motivations above and explore where we might look for changes to accommodate the executive's schedule request:
- The executive just had coffee with a potential new client who would buy a jillion copies of your product if it were available by September 1.
Does the client need all the functions planned for the full product? Perhaps we could identify a functional subset of the product that would satisfy the new client while reducing the scope of development and testing.
If you think this is a firm business proposition, might we take a loan against the expected profit on the jillion units and hire additional human resources in order to accelerate the schedule? If adding people to the project is not a viable option, could we use the money as an incentive bonus for the team?
- The executive just overheard a competitor discussing the September availability date of a comparable product.
Is it important we ship earlier, or is the concern a marketing issue? May we pre-announce availability of our product without changing the ship date to deal with the marketing pressure? Do we believe we have capabilities that distinguish us from our competition?
- The executive just found out that venture capitalists expressed concerns about your company's ability to deliver. The next meeting with the Venture Capital firm is September 15.
- The executive was intrigued by a trade show booth presentation he just saw and was imagining your product being similarly demonstrated at a trade show scheduled for mid September.
Do we need to ship sooner, or might we be able to divert some resources toward building a demo system for the VC meeting or trade show? If the original schedule was already tight, you might want to explain that rushing the product might introduce quality issues, which will reflect poorly on the company. You might also ask whether it would be possible to change the meeting with the VC's to October so that you could show them the shipped system.
- The executive was updating his "accomplishments for the second quarter" slide for the big boss and realized that there weren't many visible achievements scheduled for the third quarter. Shipping your product in the third quarter was one of several possibilities.
- The executive was wondering if you had inflated your schedule and figured it couldn't hurt to ask if you could pull it in.
This is a chance to let the executive know whether or not you think your schedule is credible and if it can be safely accelerated. What are the potential quality trade-offs of acceleration? Can additional resources be meaningfully applied to your project? If resources are tight or quality is important, you might want to suggest that the current schedule is the best course of action for this project.
Everybody Wins
Negotiation is a process that searches for a way to satisfy people who have competing needs. While some people frame negotiation as a power struggle or competition, it is often helpful to reframe negotiation as a problem?solving exercise that seeks the best available solution. Constructive negotiation requires that you understand what is motivating the parties involved and identify what can be traded. Project negotiations usually involve trade-offs among schedule, scope, and resources. Develop your negotiation skills by keeping the other party and your best interests in mind and you may find it easier to negotiate "win/win" solutions.
