Author: Leandro Benda, PMP
Politics is becoming more and more present in projects and its impact is growing consistently. This makes life difficult for project managers.
What to do ?
On Tuesday, May 10, 2022 took place our 10th Open Space on the "Zoom" platform.
The topic of this online event, "Winning Project Politics" gathered 28 project managers from different sectors such as banking, food processing, IT consulting and more.
During the different surveys, we have noticed that most project managers have been impacted by conflicts in their team caused by politics or even have been victims themselves. Politics around projects also impose often contradictory requirements in the scope and the budget,
Different "virtual rooms" of 15 minutes each were created during the event to have various exchanges on themes of the participants’ choice. These virtual rooms were each managed by a facilitator to encourage engagement and ensure the best experience for everyone.
These open and exciting exchanges included the following questions posed by the participants:
1. How to deal with project politics
2. What tools can we use if we victim of politics in the project?
3. What can we do if politics conflicts come from the top management?
In conclusion, we see that politics is becoming more and more present in projects and its impact is growing consistently. This makes life difficult for project managers.
Each project as well as each difficult situation caused by the policy is different and therefore requires a targeted approach according to the context, as a tool we can cite in particular dialogue, the search for compromise, escalation (even if risky in some cases), team meetings, one-to-one meetings, transparency, risk analyses, impacts on the critical path, scope, costs and planning of certain changes and consultation of experts in the impacted domain.
Each participant was able to freely ask questions and share his or her expertise and opinion and interesting answers were provided on these topics.
Note that the upcoming event will be published in our Event page in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, please opt-in to PMI Switzerland’s event notification or regularly visit our event page to learn more about our upcoming events: https://pmi-switzerland.ch/events